Alan Bennett Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Effort, Goes On, Found

  Alan Bennett (2017). “The History Boys: With GCSE and A Level study guide”, p.69, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Life, Glasses, Sides

  Alan Bennett (2009). “Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution”, p.178, Faber & Faber

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• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Children, Artist, Parent

  Alan Bennett (2016). “A Private Function”, p.165, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Book, Thinking, Definitions

  Alan Bennett (2014). “The Wind in the Willows”, p.7, Faber & Faber

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• Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

  Alan Bennett

  Reading, Briefing, Inviting

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.10, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Character, Mean, Refrain

  Alan Bennett (2009). “Alan Bennett Plays 2: Kafka's Dick; Insurance Man; Old Country; Englishman Abroad; Question of Attribution”, p.232, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Reading, Long, Enough

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.10, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Children, Parent, Assuming

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.82, Faber & Faber

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• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Character, Play, Years

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• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  School, Boys, Oxford

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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

  Alan Bennett

  Funny, Stupid, Race

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.22, Faber & Faber

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• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  War, People, Mourning

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• Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

  Alan Bennett

  Dream, Godly, Thinking

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

  Alan Bennett

  Standards, Courses

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

  Alan Bennett

  Intelligent, People, Intelligence

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.50, Faber & Faber

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• My films are about embarrassment.

  Alan Bennett

  Film, Embarrassment

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• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Running, School, Class

  1968 Forty Years On (published 1969), act 2. Snobbery With Violence was used as a book title by Colin Wilson (1971).

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

  Alan Bennett

  Needs, Wealth, Rich

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.27, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Children, Cheesy, Humanity

  Old Country (1978) act 2

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

  Alan Bennett

  Play, People, Mouths

  1991 In the Sunday Times, 24 Nov.

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• 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Hands, Ballet, Collaboration

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• ... 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.

  Alan Bennett

  Philosophy, Book, Way

  Alan Bennett (2008). “The Uncommon Reader”, p.6, Faber & Faber

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

  Alan Bennett

  Sex, Long, Pay

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Alan Bennett Plays 1: Forty Years On, Getting On, Habeas Corpus and Enjoy”, p.76, Faber & Faber

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• Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!

  Alan Bennett

  Depression, Cheer, Winter

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

  Alan Bennett

  Play, Form, Pursuit

  Alan Bennett (2008). “Writing Home”, p.157, Faber & Faber

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