Alan Bennett: Likeness

“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)

Reading

“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

Hate , Dogs , Question

“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)

Imagination , Boy , Fish , Future

“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)

War

“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)

School , Literature

“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
When asked by Sir Ian McKellen, in 1997, whether he was heterosexual or homosexual.

Water

“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)

Life

“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.

Education , Sex