Alan Bennett Quotations

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

Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.

The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

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.

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.

I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.

I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.

I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

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

I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.

I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.

I always like to break out and address the audience. In 'The History Boys', for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.

I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.

Last year we were more of a running team. This year we're more versatile.

He says some things which are taken as gospel, when they ought to be disputed. When he writes 'Courage is no good / It means not scaring others', you want to say that just isn't true. There is more to courage than that.

Papers like the Mail make out that people are prurient and outraged; I don't think people really care.

We have smaller defensive ends, but they're quick. They'll be OK. Everybody knows their job, and our defense is better this year. If we play better in the second half of the game this year, we'll do better.

This symposium will highlight the surprisingly diverse and positive role that cocoa can potentially play in improving public health and reinvigorating endangered tropical ecosystems. It also underscores the impact that collaborative efforts among public and private sector scientists can have in a relatively short time.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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

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'.

There's very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made. Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure. . . . A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth's.

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

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

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

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

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.

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.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

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.

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.

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

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

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

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.

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

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

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

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

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

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.

My films are about embarrassment.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

...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 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.

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

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

Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

... 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

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.

I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.

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.

I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

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

But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.

We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale....Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, "And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?

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.

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.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.