Alan Bennett Quotes - Page 3

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.

Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

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

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

There's very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made. Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure. . . . A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth's.

I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

My films are about embarrassment.

The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.

I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.

I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.

... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.

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

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!