Alan Bennett
Birthdate: May 9, 1934
Birthplace: Armley, Leeds, Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom
Occupation: Actor, Author, and Playwright
Profile: Best known for
The Madness of George III.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Bennett
Number of Quotes: 76
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Common theme, often paraphrased.
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.
London Review of Books, also cited in Keeping On Keeping On.
A library is like a cocktail bar. You don't have to drink all the cocktails. You
don't have to like all the cocktails. But you should be glad they're all there.
Often paraphrased.
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad.
Reflects a common Bennett theme on education.
A philistine is someone who doesn't care as much as you do.
Reflects a recurring Bennett observation.
All life is a rehearsal for the performance that never happens.
Reflects a Bennett theme on disappointment/aspiration.
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. 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.
Britain is a family with the wrong members in control.
An Englishman Abroad
Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Getting On
Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
Beyond the Fringe (1960).
Do you know what woke
comes from? It comes from not having had enough sleep.
Diary, London Review of Books (2018).
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
The History Boys - Mrs. Lintott
Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late
Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.
Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you. But
if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.
Attributed, though likely a paraphrase of his sentiments.
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
Habeas Corpus
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
The History Boys - Mrs. Lintott
I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.
I always like to break out and address the audience. In The History Boys
, for instance, without
any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more
adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.
I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely.
Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.
I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It
certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.
I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the
person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.
I don't believe in private education.
I 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.
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Forty Years On
I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.
Attributed, reflects his well-known views.
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.
I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.
I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.
I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.
I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
If the Prime Minister says something, it must be true. If the Archbishop says something, it may be true. But if I say something, it's just... common sense.
Reflecting his Yorkshire persona.
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
It's like algebra, life is. Why's it got to be so fucking puzzling?
The History Boys - Posner
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We're all of us looking for the key.
Beyond the Fringe sketch, often attributed to Bennett.
Literature is not about having something to say; it's about having something to ask.
Reflects his views on art and education.
My father used to say that if you ever see a man opening a car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.
My films are about embarrassment.
One of the things about getting older is that you become more like yourself.
Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you,
but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.
The History Boys - Hector
Read. Read. Read. Just read.
Essays/Interviews on education.
She's like the old horse that's been put out to grass: she's taken to eating it.
Bed Among the Lentils
Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I
take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never.
Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Standing a chance: Life is rather like a tin of sardines — we're all of us looking for the key.
Often paraphrased, but original known from Bennett.
Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use
their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to
you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
The History Boys - Hector
The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the
classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.
The habit of art isn't easy to acquire. But it is harder to lose.
The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's
on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
The problem with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Getting On
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we shall find their money.
Forty Years On
There is no period so remote as the recent past.
Forty Years On
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as
their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
We don't like to admit it, but the idea of an afterlife makes this one seem rather pointless.
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all
artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
What happens after death is more or less the same as what happens before birth. It is nothing to be afraid of.
What we need is more people who specialise in the impossible.
When people say It's the principle of the thing
, it's always the money.
You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
Forty Years On
You never stop learning. If you have a teacher, you never stop being a pupil.
You only have to survive in England and all is forgiven you ... if you can eat a boiled egg at ninety in England they think you deserve a Nobel Prize.
Your problem is you confuse having a mind with having an opinion.
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Last on Earth
