Authors
Alan Bennett Quotes
Best Quotes by Alan Bennett (Top 10)
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
Alan Bennett -
What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett -
Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
Alan Bennett -
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett -
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
Alan Bennett -
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
Alan Bennett
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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 remembering someone else.
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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 simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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 is shaped by the foot.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett -
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
Alan Bennett -
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.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett -
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 suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.
Alan Bennett