Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETTIf I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
ALAN BENNETT -
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETT -
And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT -
Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETT -
My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
ALAN BENNETT -
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
ALAN BENNETT -
Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
ALAN BENNETT -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETT -
[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
ALAN BENNETT






