Alan Bennett Quotes

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Alan Bennett (2009). “A A Life Like Other People's”, p.80, Faber & Faber

  621

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  1968 Forty Years On (published 1969), act 2. Snobbery With Violence was used as a book title by Colin Wilson (1971).

  3591

• At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

  Alan Bennett

  2547

• I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.

  Alan Bennett

  The History Boys, www.imdb.com. 2006.

  502

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

  Alan Bennett

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  569

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

  Alan Bennett

  Inspirational   Funny   Wall  

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.53, Faber & Faber

  3548

• A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

  Alan Bennett

  Reading  

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.15, Faber & Faber

  1178

• I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

  Alan Bennett

  4599

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

  Alan Bennett

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.82, Faber & Faber

  407

• Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

  Alan Bennett

  4998

• 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

  Alan Bennett

  Inspirational   Motivational   Reading  

  The History Boys, www.imdb.com. 2006.

  836

• ...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

  Reading  

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.20, Faber & Faber

  1807

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Reading  

  2325

• Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

  Alan Bennett

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.50, Faber & Faber

  5091

• 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

  Alan Bennett (2016). “Keeping On Keeping On”, p.296, Profile Books

  1566

• 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

  Reading  

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.10, Faber & Faber

  2061

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  2795

• Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

  Alan Bennett

  Inspirational   Life   Moving Forward  

  1960 Beyond the Fringe.

  414

• 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

  Alan Bennett (2009). “Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution”, p.18, Faber & Faber

  1353

• 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

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Writing Home”, p.151, Faber & Faber

  4491

• I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

  Alan Bennett

  5100

• 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

  Alan Bennett (2009). “Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution”, p.161, Faber & Faber

  1175

• I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

  Alan Bennett

  1991 In the Sunday Times, 24 Nov.

  2936

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

  1714

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  1971 Of dogs. Getting On (published 1972), act1.

  1861

• Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

  Alan Bennett

  4929

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

  Alan Bennett

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.53, Faber & Faber

  2127

• I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.

  Alan Bennett

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.27, Faber & Faber

  4816

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

  Alan Bennett

  Alan Bennett (2014). “The Wind in the Willows”, p.7, Faber & Faber

  3056

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  "Writing Home". Book by Alan Bennett, 1994.

  3108

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