Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETTRemember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETT -
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETT -
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETT -
You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETT -
Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
ALAN BENNETT -
Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETT -
Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETT -
But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETT -
We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
ALAN BENNETT -
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETT -
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETT -
I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
ALAN BENNETT -
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETT -
The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
ALAN BENNETT -
I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
ALAN BENNETT






