One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
ALAN BENNETTBut most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
ALAN BENNETT -
f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
ALAN BENNETT -
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETT -
I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETT -
It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
ALAN BENNETT -
You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
ALAN BENNETT -
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETT -
At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETT -
You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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 -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT -
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETT -
I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
ALAN BENNETT -
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
ALAN BENNETT -
One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETT -
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETT -
I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETT -
And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT -
In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT