Alan Bennett Quotes

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

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.

That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

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.

Writer: I don’t know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes – for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

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.

Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.

George: That flaming dog has messed on our steps again. It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing disappear from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhino—six of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males. Do you know what dogs are? They're those beer-sodden soccer fans piling out of coaches in a lay-by, yanking their cocks out without a blush and pissing up against the wall thirty-nine in a row. I can't stand it.

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?"

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.

Mrs Wicksteed: Of course, I've known for years our marriage has been a mockery. My body lying there night after night in the wasted moonlight. I know now how the Taj Mahal must feel.

"Then I want to end up 'Norwich. Well it's an epigrammatic way of saying 'Knickers off ready when I come home".

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.

Golightly: Call me Fingers.

Lady Dundown: How can the Zulu expect to be treated as civilized people if they declare war in the middle of the season!