Words matter. These are the best Alan Bennett Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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.
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.
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
My films are about embarrassment.
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.
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.
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn’t be able to write about.
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.
Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.
I don’t want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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.
I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
I’m less genial than people think, but I’m too timid to seem nasty.
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.
I’m more socialist certainly than New Labour – I’m very old Labour, really.
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 don’t believe in private education.
Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.
I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
