Alan Bennett: Trending quotes

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

Alan Bennett book The Uncommon Reader

Source: The Uncommon Reader

“… 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

“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

“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).