Top 100 Alan Bennett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”

— Alan Bennett

2. “I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.”

— Alan Bennett

3. “A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

— Alan Bennett

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4. “It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”

— Alan Bennett

5. “Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.”

— Alan Bennett

6. “Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.”

— Alan Bennett

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Alan Bennett

9. “You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.”

— Alan Bennett

10. “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.”

— Alan Bennett

Featured in: Reading Quotes

11. “I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.”

— Alan Bennett

12. “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.”

— Alan Bennett

13. “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

14. “Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.”

— Alan Bennett

15. “Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?”

— Alan Bennett

16. “Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.”

— Alan Bennett

17. “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

18. “All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.”

— Alan Bennett

19. “If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.”

— Alan Bennett

20. “Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.”

— Alan Bennett

21. “The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.”

— Alan Bennett

22. “I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.”

— Alan Bennett

23. “It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.”

— Alan Bennett

24. “What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.”

— Alan Bennett

25. “Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.”

— Alan Bennett

26. “At eighty things do not occur; they recur.”

— Alan Bennett

27. “Asked where his inspiration came from, he said fiercely: ‘It doesn’t come, Your Majesty. You have to go out and fetch it.”

— Alan Bennett

28. “I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?”

— Alan Bennett

29. “That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.”

— Alan Bennett

30. “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.”

— Alan Bennett

31. “One recipe for happiness is to have no sense of entitlement.”

— Alan Bennett

32. “I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.”

— Alan Bennett

33. “Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.”

— Alan Bennett

34. “God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!”

— Alan Bennett

35. “Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.”

— Alan Bennett

36. “The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.”

— Alan Bennett

37. “It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.”

— Alan Bennett

38. “I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.”

— Alan Bennett

39. “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

40. “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.”

— Alan Bennett

41. “Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.”

— Alan Bennett

42. “Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.”

— Alan Bennett

43. “One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.”

— Alan Bennett

44. “We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.”

— Alan Bennett

45. “So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.”

— Alan Bennett

46. “We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.”

— Alan Bennett

47. “Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.”

— Alan Bennett

48. “I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.”

— Alan Bennett

49. “Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.”

— Alan Bennett

50. “I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.”

— Alan Bennett