An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
ALAN BENNETTAn article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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