Alan Bennett Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Alan Bennett
Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Bennett
I am the King. I tell. I am not told. I am the verb, sir. I am not the object.

Alan Bennett
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

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

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

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

Alan Bennett
Of Arianna Stassinopoulos:
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

Alan Bennett
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

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

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

Alan Bennett
Counsel: [You are charged with] loitering to commit a felony. Now then Mr Golightly...

Alan Bennett
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

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

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

Alan Bennett
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Alan Bennett
Biography is all about cutting people down to size. Getting an unruly quart into a pint pot.

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

Alan Bennett
I was still a medieval historian, not a profession, I imagine, with a high sexual strike rate.

Alan Bennett
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.

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

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

Alan Bennett