Alan Bennett Quotes
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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.
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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.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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. And 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
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...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.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, 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.
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Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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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.
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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.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don't think it was decided at that meeting. The trouble is, as soon as you've chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of. It's like going to a place that you've never been to before - you've got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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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.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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.
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