Latest Alan Bennett Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  School, Ideas, Forgotten

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don't think it was decided at that meeting. The trouble is, as soon as you've chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of. It's like going to a place that you've never been to before - you've got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.

  Alan Bennett

  Reality, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

  Alan Bennett

  Holy Grail, Black, Frost

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. 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.

  Alan Bennett

  School, Boys, Oxford

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.

  Alan Bennett

  Broadway, Film, Made

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.

  Alan Bennett

  Successful, Thinking, Done

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!

  Alan Bennett

  Lines, Born, Guinness

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Thinking, Theatre, Directors

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk