Alan Bennett Quotes

83 quotes in 1137 categories

• If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
• We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
• I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
• Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
• We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
• Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
• So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
• Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
• 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…
• Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
• Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
• Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?
• Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
• Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
• I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on…
• Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always…
• I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
• I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
• My films are about embarrassment.
• Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

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