Alan Bennett Quotes

Golightly: Call me Fingers.

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

Brian (asked how he feels about being a politician): Passes the time. Fills in that awkward gap between the cradle and the grave.

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.

Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.

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

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.

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.

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

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.

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."

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.

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.

George: I hate them all.

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?"