Alan Bennett Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

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
The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

Alan Bennett
Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Alan Bennett
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
He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

Alan Bennett
Truth is no more at issue in an examination than thirst at a wine-tasting or fashion at a striptease.

Alan Bennett
That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

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
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
It's where they commit suicide and the king rides a bicycle, Sweden.

Alan Bennett
The appeal of reading... 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
I want you to lay down your life, Perkins. We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war.

Alan Bennett
Of Sidney and Beatrice Webb:
Two of the nicest people if ever there was one.

Alan Bennett
I generally assume that childhoods more or less ended with the First World War.... Anyone born after 1940 got the Utility version, childhood according to the Authorized Economy Standard.

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
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
The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.

Alan Bennett
Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

Alan Bennett
I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.

Alan Bennett
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

Alan Bennett
Outside Shakespeare the word treason to me means nothing. Only, you pissed in our soup and we drank it.
Coral Browne to Guy Burgess

Alan Bennett
When people are on their best behaviour they aren't always at their best.

Alan Bennett
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
I go to the theatre to be entertained, I want to be taken out of myself, I don't want to see lust and rape and incest and sodomy and so on, I can get all that at home.

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