Alan Bennett quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Alan Bennett on Wise Famous Quotes.

Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

Still, to be urged to write and to be urged to publish are two different things and nobody so far was urging her to do the latter.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

You don't put your life into books. You find it there.

My films are about embarrassment.

Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

She wasn't wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that unfatuated her a bit.

Never at my best when at my best behaviour.

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less ... selfish.

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.

I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.

Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.

I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never.

History nowadays is not a matter of conviction.
It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

Once upon a time I had my life planned out...

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.

I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

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.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.

The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. Good-looking people marry good-looking people and the others take what's left.

How old does one have to be still to say tits?

I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!

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!

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.

I note at the age of ten a fully developed ability not quite to enjoy myself, a capacity I have retained intact ever since.

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess

Here I sit, alone at 60,
Bald and fat and full of sin
Cold the seat, and loud the cistern
As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!

Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.

It is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

I know what's required. It's perfectly simple: Justice.

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

I don't believe in private education.

Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.

I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

She'd never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people.

If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

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

I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.

I am the King. I tell. I am not told. I am the verb, sir. I am not the object. (King George III)

I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

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.

Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.

How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another

as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.