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Alan Bennett Quotes

Alan Bennett is an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, and author. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University, where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full-time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968.

His work includes The Madness of George III and its film adaptation, the series of monologues Talking Heads, play and subsequent film of The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. May 1934
Alan Bennett photo

Works

The Uncommon Reader
The History Boys
The History Boys
Alan Bennett
Forty Years On
Forty Years On
Alan Bennett
The Uncommon Reader
The History Boys
The History Boys
Alan Bennett
Forty Years On
Forty Years On
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett: 56 quotes2 likes

Famous Alan Bennett Quotes

“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.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

“[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.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“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.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“One reads for pleasure… it is not a public duty.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett Quotes about reading

“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.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“… 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.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less… selfish.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett: Trending quotes

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

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

Alan Bennett

Source: Getting On, Act 1 (1972).

“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."

[(, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]”

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett Quotes

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

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

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

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

“Cloisters, ancient libraries… I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

“I don't always understand poetry!'

'You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it… whenever.”

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

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

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

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

Alan Bennett The History Boys

Source: The History Boys

“… 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 book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

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

Alan Bennett

"Alas! Deceived", p. 367 (1993).
Writing Home (1994)

“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

Diary entry for June 27, 1988, p. 177.
Writing Home (1994)

“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."”

Alan Bennett

Introduction, p. x (1994).
Writing Home (1994)

“Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2, p. 78.
Forty Years On (1972)

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

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2, p. 80.
Forty Years On (1972)

“One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.”

Alan Bennett

"Instead of a Present", p. 323 (1982).
Writing Home (1994)

“Polly: Question is whether you hate the coach party because they're like the dogs or hate the dogs because they're like the coach party.”

Alan Bennett

“The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.”

Alan Bennett

"Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 335 (1987).
Writing Home (1994)

“Then I want to end up 'Norwich. Well it's an epigrammatic way of saying 'Knickers off ready when I come home.”

Alan Bennett

On the Margin (1966)

“Headmaster: Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince, with in his belt the short curved, gold sword of the Ashraf descendants of the Prophet, he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken. "Who am I?" he would cry despairingly. "You are Lawrence of Arabia" passers-by would stop him and say, "And I claim my five pounds."”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 1, p. 56.
Forty Years On (1972)

“Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2, p. 80.
Forty Years On (1972)

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

Alan Bennett

"The Pith and its Pitfalls", p. 384 (1981).
Writing Home (1994)

“He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.”

Alan Bennett

"Russell Harty, 1934 – 1988", p. 52 (1988).
Writing Home (1994)

“He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.”

Alan Bennett

"Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 336.
Writing Home (1994)

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

Alan Bennett

An Englishman Abroad (1983).

“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?"”

Alan Bennett

Diary entry for July 25, 1985, p. 144.
Writing Home (1994)

“Headmaster: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 1, p. 40.
Forty Years On (1972)

“Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2.
Bennett is often credited with having coined the pun "snobbery with violence", though he himself pointed out in Writing Home (1994), p. 199, that the phrase had been used by Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk in 1932 as the title of a pamphlet.
Forty Years On (1972)

“I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.”

Alan Bennett

Diary entry for August 9, 1985, p. 290.
Writing Home (1994)

“Golightly: Call me Fingers.”

Alan Bennett

On the Margin (1966)

“Writer: I don’t 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.”

Alan Bennett

"The Pith and its Pitfalls", p. 384 (1981).
Writing Home (1994)

“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.”

Alan Bennett

Diary entry for November 11, 1981, p. 117.
Writing Home (1994)

“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.”

Alan Bennett

"Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 348.
Writing Home (1994)

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

Alan Bennett

Quoted in the Daily Telegraph, October 30, 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/10/30/dl3003.xml <br class="br">When asked by Sir Ian McKellen, in 1997, whether he was heterosexual or homosexual.

“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.”

Alan Bennett

"The Pith and its Pitfalls", p. 385 (1981).
Writing Home (1994)

“However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.”

Alan Bennett

"Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 347.
Referring to Max Brod
Writing Home (1994)

“Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?”

Alan Bennett Forty Years On

Act 2, p. 75.
Of the Bloomsbury group.
Forty Years On (1972)

“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.”

Alan Bennett

Diary entry for October 13, 1984, pp. 137-138.
Writing Home (1994)

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

Alan Bennett

Diary entry for June 7, 1985, p. 143.
Writing Home (1994)

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

Alan Bennett

Getting On, Act 1.

“George: I hate them all.”

Alan Bennett

Getting On, Act 1 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9oQ7ixhMOvoC&amp;pg=PT78&amp;lpg=PT78&amp;dq=%22six+of+them+left+in+the+Serengeti+National+Park%22&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=TH3N9i4L0i&amp;sig=Os09ib4PvAEbQ3RjCJeh-R3j4Kk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=dp5sU9yYHcPH7Aa7uoCABQ&amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;q=%22six%20of%20them%20left%20in%20the%20Serengeti%20National%20Park%22&amp;f=false.

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