Alan Bennett Quotes
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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.
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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.
... 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.
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
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.
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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.
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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.
...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.
I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!
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.
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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.
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.
I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.
I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.
Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.
Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.
