Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETTI don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT -
Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETT -
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETT -
Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETT -
Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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 -
They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
ALAN BENNETT -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETT -
I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
ALAN BENNETT -
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETT -
You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
ALAN BENNETT -
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
ALAN BENNETT -
The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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 -
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
ALAN BENNETT






