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.
ALAN BENNETTThere’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
ALAN BENNETTKafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
ALAN BENNETTMemories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
ALAN BENNETTDefinition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETTPolly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETTI wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
ALAN BENNETTYou must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
ALAN BENNETTI’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETTMy experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETTBooks generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETTIt was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTOur father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
ALAN BENNETTI was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
ALAN BENNETTMark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETTBecause 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.
ALAN BENNETTThe liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETT