Alan Bennett Quotes

Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.

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

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

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

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

Golightly: Call me Fingers.

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.

However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.

Counsel: [You are charged with] loitering to commit a felony. Now then Mr Golightly...

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

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.

George: I hate them all.

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

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.