Alan Bennett Quotes

83 quotes in 1137 categories

• I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of…
• Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
• 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…
• Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
• The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and…
• You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you…
• There's very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made. Over…
• Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
• I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
• Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
• At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
• Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows…
• The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to…
• I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
• It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the…
• Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
• But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want…
• What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I…
• At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink)…
• I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it…

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