Alan Bennett Quotes & Sayings

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface. — Alan Bennett

I think of literature,' she wrote, 'as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started to late. I will never catch up. — Alan Bennett

How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another — Alan Bennett

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less ... selfish. — Alan Bennett

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity. — Alan Bennett

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists? — Alan Bennett

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never. — Alan Bennett

Marriage is supposed to be a partnership. Good-looking people marry good-looking people and the others take what's left. — Alan Bennett

Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy. — 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

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

The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't. — Alan Bennett

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

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

The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this. — Alan Bennett

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

I dont 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

Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen? — Alan Bennett

One has met and indeed entertained many visiting heads of state, some of them unspeakable crooks and blackguards ... One has given one's white-gloved hand to hands that were steeped in blood and conversed politely with men who have personally slaughtered children. One has waded through excrement and gore ... Sometimes one has felt like a scented candle, sent in to perfume a regime, or aerate a policy, monarchy these days just a government-issue deoderant. — Alan Bennett

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

I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky. — Alan Bennett

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

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key. — 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 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

I don't believe in private education. — Alan Bennett

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

I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with. — Alan Bennett

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

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books. — Alan Bennett

Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up. — Alan Bennett

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university. — Alan Bennett

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own. — Alan Bennett

To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time. — Alan Bennett

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

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

Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains. — Alan Bennett

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

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable. — Alan Bennett

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

Books are wonderful, aren't they?' she said to the vice-chancellor who concurred.
'At the risk of sounding like a piece of steak,' she said, 'they tenderise one. — Alan Bennett

One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn. — Alan Bennett

TIMMS: I don't see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet.
HECTOR: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys.
LOCKWOOD: Fucking Ada.
HECTOR: Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions! — Alan Bennett

It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful. — Alan Bennett

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. — Alan Bennett

Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking of character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. 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 to the foot. — Alan Bennett

IRWIN: At the time of the Reformation there were fourteen foreskins of Christ preserved, but it was thought that the church of St John Lateran in Rome had the authentic prepuce.
DAKIN: Don't think we're shocked by your mention of the word 'foreskin', sir.
CROWTHER: No, sir. Some of us even have them.
LOCKWOOD: Not Posner, though, sir. Posner's like, you know, Jewish.
It's one of several things Posner doesn't have.
(Posner mouths 'fuck off.') — Alan Bennett

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

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

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off. — Alan Bennett

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

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

I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated. — Alan Bennett

and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including one of the economist G. D. H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, 'And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G. D. H. Dole.' Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, 'Cole not Dole.' In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve. — 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

I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one. — Alan Bennett

How old does one have to be still to say tits? — Alan Bennett

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development. — Alan Bennett

Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd. — Alan Bennett

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined. — Alan Bennett

Still, to be urged to write and to be urged to publish are two different things and nobody so far was urging her to do the latter. — Alan Bennett

Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?"
"I beg your pardon, ma'am?"
"In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It's not laid down, is it? It's not off-limits?"
"Not that I'm aware, ma'am."
"Good. Well in that case I'm going to start. Leviticus, here I come. Goodnight."
The archbishop shook his head and went back to Strictly Come Dancing. — Alan Bennett

It is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin. — Alan Bennett

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

I note at the age of ten a fully developed ability not quite to enjoy myself, a capacity I have retained intact ever since. — Alan Bennett

When they arrived at the palace she had a word with Grant, the young footman in charge, who said it was security and that while ma'am had been in the Lords the sniffer dogs had been round and security had confiscated the book. He though it had probably been exploded.
'Exploded?' said the Queen. 'But it was Anita Brookner. — Alan Bennett

BURGESS
How do you like Moscow?

CORAL
Loathe it, darling. I cannot understand what those Three Sisters were on about. It gives the play a very sinister slant. — Alan Bennett

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

I am the King. I tell. I am not told. I am the verb, sir. I am not the object. (King George III) — Alan Bennett

I am married,' she shouted, 'to the cupboard under the sink.' A remark made more mysterious to Mrs Barnes by the sound of a passing ice-cream van playing the opening bars of the 'Blue Danube'. — Alan Bennett

She'd never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people. — Alan Bennett

History nowadays is not a matter of conviction.
It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so. — Alan Bennett

Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement. — Alan Bennett

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

I would have thought," said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature."
"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity. — Alan Bennett

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

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

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

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off. — 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

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself. — Alan Bennett

Once upon a time I had my life planned out... — Alan Bennett

You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find. — Alan Bennett

I always like to break out and address the audience. In 'The History Boys', for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up. — Alan Bennett

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else. — Alan Bennett

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts. — Alan Bennett

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out. — Alan Bennett

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed. — Alan Bennett

Here I sit, alone at 60,
Bald and fat and full of sin
Cold the seat, and loud the cistern
As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin — Alan Bennett

as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right. — 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

I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty. — Alan Bennett

Never at my best when at my best behaviour. — Alan Bennett

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules. — Alan Bennett

She wasn't wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that unfatuated her a bit. — Alan Bennett

F they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line! — Alan Bennett