Alan Bennett Quotes

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

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."

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.

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

Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date.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

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

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

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

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."

Lady Dundown: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

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

Golightly: Call me Fingers.

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

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

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