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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
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More quotes by Alan Bennett
... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.
Alan Bennett
The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
Alan Bennett
I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
Alan Bennett
I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
Alan Bennett
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
Alan Bennett
I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
Alan Bennett
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
Alan Bennett
But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
Alan Bennett
It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
Alan Bennett
But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
Alan Bennett
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
Alan Bennett
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
Alan Bennett
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Alan Bennett
