To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
ALAN BENNETTTo play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
ALAN BENNETTYou don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETTOne of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
ALAN BENNETTCulminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETTWe still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
ALAN BENNETTThe longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETTAt 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.
ALAN BENNETTI have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETTSo, 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.
ALAN BENNETTNor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETTBut most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETTHad your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETTIt was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTThe trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
ALAN BENNETTSometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETT