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.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

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.

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.

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.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

[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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

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.

But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.

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."

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

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!

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

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

My films are about embarrassment.

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

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