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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.

— Alan Bennett Writing Home (1994)

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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Alan Bennett (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.