Alan Bennett Quotes

Polly: Question is whether you hate the coach party because they're like the dogs or hate the dogs because they're like the coach party.

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

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?"

Golightly: Call me Fingers.

I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Geoff: We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

George: I hate them all.

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.

Headmaster: Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?