Alan Bennett Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

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.

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.

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

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

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

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

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.

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

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.

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

My films are about embarrassment.

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!

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

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!

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.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

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

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