Top 100 Quotes About Alan Bennett
#1. Maybe the memory does play tricks. Increasingly, I'm thinking, 'What was their name? I knew that name yesterday.' I think that's what happens. At some point, I'll forget that I ever worked with Peter Cook, I suppose, and Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller.
Dudley Moore
#2. I found reading Alan Bennett striking because you have this sudden flash of recognition when you read about a boy who has intellectual interests utterly different from his parents.
Michael Gove
#3. 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
#5. If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did ... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.
Michael Morpurgo
#6. they would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and maybe even uncommon ones.
Will Schwalbe
#7. Alan Bennett and Judi Dench are amazingly talented people who don't let you down when you meet them.
Alan Titchmarsh
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Alan Bennett
#11. I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.
Alan Bennett
#12. 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
#13. It is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.
Alan Bennett
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
#17. Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Alan Bennett
#18. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
Alan Bennett
#19. I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
#20. 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
#21. Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
#22. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
Alan Bennett
#23. So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
#24. as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.
Alan Bennett
#25. Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.
Alan Bennett
#26. I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
Alan Bennett
#27. I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
Alan Bennett
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
Alan Bennett
#31. Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.
Alan Bennett
#32. Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett
#33. I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
Alan Bennett
#34. 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
#35. I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
#36. I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.
Alan Bennett
#37. 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
#38. To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less ... selfish.
Alan Bennett
#39. I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
#40. I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
Alan Bennett
#41. Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Alan Bennett
#42. 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
#43. We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
Alan Bennett
#44. If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
Alan Bennett
#45. 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
#46. You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
#47. I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.
Alan Bennett
#48. 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
#49. Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never.
Alan Bennett
#50. The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
Alan Bennett
#51. Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
Alan Bennett
#52. She said, 'He knows what I mean. Where did you get those shoes?' He said, 'They're training shoes.' She said, 'Training for what? Are you not fully qualified?' He said, 'If Jesus were alive today, Mrs Whittaker, I think you'd find these were the type of shoes he would be wearing.
Alan Bennett
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. She felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
Alan Bennett
#58. All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.
Alan Bennett
#60. Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
Alan Bennett
#61. Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
Alan Bennett
#62. One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
#63. Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
#64. Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
Alan Bennett
#65. I know what's required. It's perfectly simple: Justice.
Alan Bennett
#66. At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
Alan Bennett
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
Alan Bennett
#71. I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
Alan Bennett
#72. Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. Good-looking people marry good-looking people and the others take what's left.
Alan Bennett
#73. Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
Alan Bennett
#74. Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.
Alan Bennett
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!
Alan Bennett
#78. I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.
Alan Bennett
#79. 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
#80. You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
Alan Bennett
#81. That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
#82. Once upon a time I had my life planned out...
Alan Bennett
#83. 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
#84. Never at my best when at my best behaviour.
Alan Bennett
#85. If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
Alan Bennett
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
#89. 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
#90. A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan Bennett
#91. 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
#92. We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Alan Bennett
#93. What people want to read often seems incongruous. A pair of biker-types taking away Thoughts of the Dalai Lama. People without access to instruments requesting sheet music. Aspiring poets sharing their work and then borrowing horror stories.
Alan Bennett
#94. 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
#95. Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
#96. I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.
Alan Bennett
#97. How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another
Alan Bennett
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
