Alan Bennett Quotes
1934 -
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I
want a future that will live up to my past.
1984 Spoken by Maggie Smith as Joyce Chilvers in A Private Function. 
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More Alan Bennett Quotes
Life is rather like a tin of sardineswe're all of us looking for the key.
Alan Bennett— 1960 Beyond the Fringe.
I've never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Alan Bennett— 1968 FortyYears On (published1969), act1.
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, theyare garlands.
Alan Bennett— 1968 FortyYears On (published1969), act 2.
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
Alan Bennett— 1968 FortyYears On (published1969), act 2. Snobbery With Violence was used as a book title by Colin Wilson (1971).
It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
Alan Bennett— 1971Of dogs. Getting On (published1972), act1.
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 those that don't.
Alan Bennett— 1973 Habeas Corpus.
One of the few things I have learned in life isthat there is invariablysomething odd about womenwho wearankle socks.
Alan Bennett— 1977 The Old Country, act1.
We were put to Dickens as children but it never took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Alan Bennett— 1977 The Old Country, act 2.
They're going to have to be made to sit up and take notice. They're going to have to be made to realise who we are. My father had a chain of dry cleaners.
Alan Bennett— 1984 A Private Function.
Myclaimtoliterary fameisthat Iusedto deliver meattoa woman who becameT. S. Eliot's mother-in-law.
Alan Bennett— 1992 In the Observer, 26 Apr. The lady in question was the mother of Eliot's wife Valerie Fletcher; Bennett's father was the butcher in the sameYorkshire village.
Geoff: We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett— Getting On, Act 1 (1972)
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
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett— An Englishman Abroad (1983)
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. [2]When asked by Sir Ian McKellen, in 1997, whether he was heterosexual or homosexual.
Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.
Alan Bennett— Act 2, p. 78.
Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett— Act 2, p. 80.
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— Act 2Bennett 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.
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."
Alan Bennett— Introduction, p. x (1994)
He had never read Proust , but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.
Alan Bennett— "Russell Harty, 1934 – 1988", p. 52 (1988)
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
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
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
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)
The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.
Alan Bennett— "Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 335 (1987)
He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.
Alan Bennett— "Kafka in Las Vegas", p. 336
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
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett— "Alas! Deceived", p. 367 (1993)
Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.
Alan Bennett— "The Pith and its Pitfalls", p. 384 (1981)
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)
