Alan Bennett Quotes

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'.

To her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice ... Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.

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.

What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.

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.

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.

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.
[Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]

The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.

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

They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.

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

But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.

Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.

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.

There was little to choose between Jews and Catholics. The Jews had holidays that turned up out of the blue and the Catholics had children in much the same way.

You don't put your life into books. You find it there.

The king is up. You attend on the king, not on the clock. When the king is awake, you are awake.

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

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.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

Once upon a time I had my life planned out...

Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.

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.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

A man has been arrested in Epsom for signalling to German planes with a lighted cigarette

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.

I know what's required. It's perfectly simple: Justice.

All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.

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

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

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

The closest she got to pretence was politeness.

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

The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

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

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

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

One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

Never at my best when at my best behaviour.

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.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

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.')

I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

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

Today's ideology masquerades as pragmatism with that pragmatism reduced to the simplistic assumption that the basis of human nature is self-interest, a view which discount philanthropy, discredits altruism, with the only motive deserving of trust self-promotion and self-advancement.
This so-called pragmatism is wicked and it is doubly so because it is held up as being both realistic and a virtue. Whereas it is shallow, shabby and all too often callous.

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

Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her life of all purpose.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

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.

Since Betty was on the pill or took precautions of her own which Graham did not choose to enquire into, the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilerating.

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

[talking about the Holocaust]
'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.'
'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be ... even on the Holocaust.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

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

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

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.

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

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

My experience came before most of you were born. My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn't normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge. But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge. So, half a dozen of us tried - not all of us in history - and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

Good nature, or what is often considered as such, is the most selfish of all virtues: it is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition. William Hazlitt, 'On the Knowledge of Character' (1822)

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.

In fact she knew perfectly well (Norman again), but to her everybody's name was immaterial, as indeed was everything else, their clothes, their voice, their class. She was a genuine democrat, perhaps the only one in the country.

I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.

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

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.

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

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.

Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

30 November. My dustbin has been on its last legs for some time, and after the binmen have called this morning I find no trace of it. Never having heard of tautology, the binmen have put the dustbin in the dustbin.

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

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

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