Alan Bennett quotes

Geoff: We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules. (Alan Bennett)
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
Alan Bennett
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
Alan Bennett
I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things. "The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize." "Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I'm not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."
Alan Bennett
That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
Alan Bennett
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
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)
Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?
Alan Bennett
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
Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
Alan Bennett
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
Alan Bennett
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
One reads for pleasure... it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale....Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, "And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?" (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
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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
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