Alan Bennett Quotes

Headmaster: Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince, with in his belt the short curved, gold sword of the Ashraf descendants of the Prophet, he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken. "Who am I?" he would cry despairingly. "You are Lawrence of Arabia" passers-by would stop him and say, "And I claim my five pounds."

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.

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.

He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

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

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

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

Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date.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

The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.

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."

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

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

George: I hate them all.

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

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