Top 100 Alan Bennett Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.
Alan Bennett
#3. I am married,' she shouted, 'to the cupboard under the sink.' A remark made more mysterious to Mrs Barnes by the sound of a passing ice-cream van playing the opening bars of the 'Blue Danube'.
Alan Bennett
#4. It is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.
Alan Bennett
#5. Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?
Alan Bennett
#6. The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.
Alan Bennett
#7. I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
#8. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
Alan Bennett
#9. Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
#10. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
Alan Bennett
#11. So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
#12. as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.
Alan Bennett
#13. Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.
Alan Bennett
#14. I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
Alan Bennett
#15. 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
#16. Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)
Alan Bennett
#17. It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
Alan Bennett
#18. Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.
Alan Bennett
#19. Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett
#20. But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.
Alan Bennett
#21. I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
#22. The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.
Alan Bennett
#23. To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less ... selfish.
Alan Bennett
#24. I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
#25. Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Alan Bennett
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.
Alan Bennett
#29. I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
Alan Bennett
#30. Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never.
Alan Bennett
#31. Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
Alan Bennett
#32. 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
#33. An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
Alan Bennett
#34. 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
#35. They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.
Alan Bennett
#36. All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.
Alan Bennett
#38. Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
Alan Bennett
#39. At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
Alan Bennett
#40. Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
#41. The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
Alan Bennett
#42. The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Alan Bennett
#43. I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
Alan Bennett
#44. I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
Alan Bennett
#45. Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.
Alan Bennett
#46. But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
Alan Bennett
#47. Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.
Scripps: No.
Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.
Alan Bennett
#48. That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
#49. Once upon a time I had my life planned out...
Alan Bennett
#50. 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
#51. Never at my best when at my best behaviour.
Alan Bennett
#52. 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
#53. 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.
Alan Bennett
#54. I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
Alan Bennett
#55. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan Bennett
#56. What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.
Alan Bennett
#57. 30 November. My dustbin has been on its last legs for some time, and after the binmen have called this morning I find no trace of it. Never having heard of tautology, the binmen have put the dustbin in the dustbin.
Alan Bennett
#58. Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
#59. How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another
Alan Bennett
#60. I would have thought," said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature."
"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity.
Alan Bennett
#61. I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess
Alan Bennett
#65. There was little to choose between Jews and Catholics. The Jews had holidays that turned up out of the blue and the Catholics had children in much the same way.
Alan Bennett
#66. Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
Alan Bennett
#67. Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.
Alan Bennett
#68. There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
Alan Bennett
#69. BURGESS
How do you like Moscow?
CORAL
Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant.
Alan Bennett
#70. Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett
#71. 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
#72. I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
Alan Bennett
#73. 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
#74. Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.
Alan Bennett
#75. Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Alan Bennett
#76. I think of literature,' she wrote, 'as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started to late. I will never catch up.
Alan Bennett
#77. Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett
#78. Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
Alan Bennett
#79. 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
#80. History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Alan Bennett
#81. Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
Alan Bennett
#82. I don't always understand poetry!'
'You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it ... whenever.
Alan Bennett
#83. To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
Alan Bennett
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
Alan Bennett
#87. Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
Alan Bennett
#88. 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
#89. [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
#90. 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
#91. To her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice ... Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.
Alan Bennett
#92. Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
Alan Bennett
#94. 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
#95. But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
Alan Bennett
#96. How old does one have to be still to say tits?
Alan Bennett
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
Alan Bennett
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