Quote

Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.

Alan Bennett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Makes
Always
Date
Standards
Computer

More quotes by Alan Bennett

Image
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 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'
Alan Bennett
Image
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
Image
My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
Image
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
Image
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.
Alan Bennett
Image
You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
Alan Bennett
Image
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
Alan Bennett
Image
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Alan Bennett
Image
Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Alan Bennett
Image
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
Image
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
Alan Bennett
Image
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Alan Bennett
Image
All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
Alan Bennett
Image
Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
Alan Bennett
Image
Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
Alan Bennett
Image
Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
Image
It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
Alan Bennett
Image
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett
Image
Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
Alan Bennett
Image
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
Alan Bennett