Alan Bennett Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

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
Headmaster: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

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
You are thirty-two. You are rapidly approaching the age when your body, whether it embarrasses you or not, begins to embarrass other people.

Alan Bennett
Writer: I don't 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
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

Alan Bennett
To be heir to the throne is not a position; it is a predicament.

Alan Bennett
I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

Alan Bennett
You only have to survive in England and all is forgiven you … if you can eat a boiled egg at ninety in England they think you deserve a Nobel Prize.

Alan Bennett
Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.

Alan Bennett
Language is balls coming at you from every angle.

Alan Bennett
They are rolling up the maps all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Alan Bennett
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

Alan Bennett
Cloisters, ancient libraries... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

Alan Bennett