We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTThe trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETT