Alan Bennett Quotes

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.

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

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

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

The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.

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.

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

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

So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.

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.

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

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

My films are about embarrassment.

I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.

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

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.

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.

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.

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

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

I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don't think it was decided at that meeting. The trouble is, as soon as you've chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of. It's like going to a place that you've never been to before - you've got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.

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

Of course my standards are out of date!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

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

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!

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!

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.

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

It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

[talking about the Holocaust] 'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.' 'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be... even on the Holocaust.

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

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

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?