Alan Bennett Quotes
Collection of top 94 famous quotes about Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Alan Bennett quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.
— Alan Bennett
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.
— Alan Bennett
The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.
— Alan Bennett
At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
— Alan Bennett
Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
— Alan Bennett
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
— Alan Bennett
You don't put your life into books. You find it there.
— Alan Bennett
My films are about embarrassment.
— Alan Bennett
Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
— Alan Bennett
She wasn't wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that unfatuated her a bit.
— Alan Bennett
Never at my best when at my best behaviour.
— Alan Bennett
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less ... selfish.
— 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
I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.
— 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
I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.
— Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett is a starmaker; he's the Simon Cowell of the theatre world! He's a beautiful, beautiful man: completely humble and so accessible.
— Russell Tovey
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never.
— Alan Bennett
History nowadays is not a matter of conviction.It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so. — Alan Bennett
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
— Alan Bennett
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.
— Alan Bennett
Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
— Alan Bennett
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
— Alan Bennett
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
— Alan Bennett
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
— 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
The Uncommon Reader, a novella by Alan Bennett
— Will Schwalbe
That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
— Alan Bennett
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
— Alan Bennett
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.
— Alan Bennett
The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.
— Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
— Alan Bennett
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
— Alan Bennett
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
— Alan Bennett
Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. Good-looking people marry good-looking people and the others take what's left.
— Alan Bennett
How old does one have to be still to say tits?
— Alan Bennett
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
— Alan Bennett
I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.
— Alan Bennett
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
— Alan Bennett
God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!
— Alan Bennett
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
No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
— Alan Bennett
Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
— Alan Bennett
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
— Alan Bennett
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
— Alan Bennett
I note at the age of ten a fully developed ability not quite to enjoy myself, a capacity I have retained intact ever since.
— Alan Bennett
Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess
— Alan Bennett
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 — Alan Bennett
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
— 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
Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.
— Alan Bennett
It is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.
— Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett and Judi Dench are amazingly talented people who don't let you down when you meet them.
— Alan Titchmarsh
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
— Alan Bennett
I know what's required. It's perfectly simple: Justice.
— Alan Bennett
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
— Alan Bennett
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.
— 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 am the King. I tell. I am not told. I am the verb, sir. I am not the object. (King George III)
— Alan Bennett
I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
— Alan Bennett
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
— Alan Bennett
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
— Alan Bennett
Once upon a time I had my life planned out...
— Alan Bennett
I don't believe in private education.
— Alan Bennett
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
— Alan Bennett
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
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
— Alan Bennett
as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.
— Alan Bennett
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
— Alan Bennett