Alan Bennett Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

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

Alan Bennett
Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all of us looking for the key.

Alan Bennett
Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.

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

Alan Bennett
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
Every family has a secret, and the secret is that it's not like other families.

Alan Bennett
Then I want to end up 'Norwich. Well it's an epigrammatic way of saying 'Knickers off ready when I come home.

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

Alan Bennett
Above literature?... Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

Alan Bennett
To be Prince of Wales is not a position. It is a predicament.

Alan Bennett
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
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
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
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
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
Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.

Alan Bennett
Headmaster: Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince, with in his belt the short curved, gold sword of the Ashraf descendants of the Prophet, he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken. "Who am I?" he would cry despairingly. "You are Lawrence of Arabia" passers-by would stop him and say, "And I claim my five pounds."

Alan Bennett
All women dress like their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man ever does. That is his.

Alan Bennett
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
However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.

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

Alan Bennett
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

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

Alan Bennett
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.

Alan Bennett
If you live to be ninety in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.

Alan Bennett
Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

Alan Bennett
After the Evening News had called him to ask for a comment on Harold Pinter's fiftieth birthday:
I don't; it's only later I realize I could have suggested two minutes' silence.

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

Alan Bennett
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