Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Bennett

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't believe in private education.

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

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My films are about embarrassment.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

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 always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.

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

Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.

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

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

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

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.

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.

It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

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."

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

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

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

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

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.

The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

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

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?

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