If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTIf I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTWe were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETTHave you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETTOnce I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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 BENNETTPhilip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
ALAN BENNETTKnowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETTWe started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETTI 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 BENNETTMy school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTI write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETTIt was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTIllogically, 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.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETT