Alan Bennett: Trending quotes

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Alan Bennett: 112 quotes2 likes

“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&pg=PT78&lpg=PT78&dq=%22six+of+them+left+in+the+Serengeti+National+Park%22&source=bl&ots=TH3N9i4L0i&sig=Os09ib4PvAEbQ3RjCJeh-R3j4Kk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dp5sU9yYHcPH7Aa7uoCABQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22six%20of%20them%20left%20in%20the%20Serengeti%20National%20Park%22&f=false.