Alan Bennett Quotes
Top 91 wise famous quotes and sayings by Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Alan Bennett on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.
She wasn't wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that unfatuated her a bit.
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less ... selfish.
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've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.
History nowadays is not a matter of conviction.
It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so.
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.
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.
Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. Good-looking people marry good-looking people and the others take what's left.
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!
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.
I note at the age of ten a fully developed ability not quite to enjoy myself, a capacity I have retained intact ever since.
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
Bald and fat and full of sin
Cold the seat, and loud the cistern
As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.