Alan Bennett Quotes

born 1934 England

Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is an English playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, essayist and actor. He first came to notice as a writer-performer of Beyond the Fringe.

England
Actors
Essayists
Memoirists
Playwrights

Random Alan Bennett quote

30 quotes

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

Writing Home (1994)

I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.

Writing Home (1994)

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

An Englishman Abroad (1983)

The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.

Writing Home (1994)

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.

Writing Home (1994)

Brian (asked how he feels about being a politician): Passes the time. Fills in that awkward gap between the cradle and the grave.

He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

Writing Home (1994)

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

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.

Writing Home (1994)

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

Writing Home (1994)

Because something is not what it is said to be, Ma'am, does not mean it is a fake. It may just have been wrongly attributed.

He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.

Writing Home (1994)

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.

Writing Home (1994)

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

Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.

Forty Years On (1969)

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

Forty Years On (1969)

Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?

Forty Years On (1969)

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

Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

Forty Years On (1969)

Lady Dundown: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

Forty Years On (1969)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Alan Bennett (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.