Top 100 Alan Bennett Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.”

— Alan Bennett

52. “I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.”

— Alan Bennett

53. “I think of literature,′ she wrote, ’as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started to late. I will never catch up.”

— Alan Bennett

54. “To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.”

— Alan Bennett

55. “Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”

— Alan Bennett

56. “No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.”

— Alan Bennett

57. “I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.”

— Alan Bennett

58. “I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.”

— Alan Bennett

59. “30 November. My dustbin has been on its last legs for some time, and after the binmen have called this morning I find no trace of it. Never having heard of tautology, the binmen have put the dustbin in the dustbin.”

— Alan Bennett

60. “Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.”

— Alan Bennett

61. “My films are about embarrassment.”

— Alan Bennett

62. “Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.”

— Alan Bennett

63. “What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

— Alan Bennett

64. “Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.”

— Alan Bennett

65. “One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.”

— Alan Bennett

66. “The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next. It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.”

— Alan Bennett

67. “Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”

— Alan Bennett

68. “Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it.”

— Alan Bennett

69. “Stava anche scoprendo che un libro tira l’altro; ovunque si voltava si aprivano nuove porte e le giornate erano troppo corte per leggere quanto avrebbe voluto. Ma era dispiaciuta, e anche mortificata, al pensiero di tutte le occasioni che si era lasciata sfuggire.”

— Alan Bennett

70. “An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail, listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.”

— Alan Bennett

71. “There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.”

— Alan Bennett

72. “But ma’am must have been briefed, surely?’ ‘Of course,’ said the Queen, ’but briefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

— Alan Bennett

73. “I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.”

— Alan Bennett

74. “Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.”

— Alan Bennett

75. “Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.”

— Alan Bennett

76. “To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.”

— Alan Bennett

77. “Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.”

— Alan Bennett

78. “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.”

— Alan Bennett

79. “One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.′ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.”

— Alan Bennett

80. “Still as I’ve said all along, you can’t polish a turd.”

— Alan Bennett

81. “The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.”

— Alan Bennett

82. “A man has been arrested in Epsom for signalling to German planes with a lighted cigarette.”

— Alan Bennett

83. “How old does one have to be still to say tits?”

— Alan Bennett

84. “I know what’s required. It’s perfectly simple: Justice.”

— Alan Bennett

85. “Had she been asked if reading had enriched her life she would have had to say yes, undoubtedly, though adding with equal certainty that it had at the same time drained her life of all purpose.”

— Alan Bennett

86. “The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.”

— Alan Bennett

87. “Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

— Alan Bennett

88. “Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.”

— Alan Bennett

89. “The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.”

— Alan Bennett

90. “Unlike today’s ideologues, whom I would call single-minded if mind came into it at all, I have no fear of the state.”

— Alan Bennett

91. “Stava scoprendo che un libro tira l’altro; ovunque si voltava si aprivano nuove porte e le giornate erano sempre troppo corte per leggere quanto avrebbe voluto.”

— Alan Bennett

92. “When dead she would exist only in the memories of people. She, who had never been subject to anyone would now be on the par with everybody else. Reading could not change that. Though writing might.”

— Alan Bennett

93. “And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.”

— Alan Bennett

94. “Never at my best when at my best behaviour.”

— Alan Bennett

95. “The closest she got to pretence was politeness.”

— Alan Bennett

96. “Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?”

— Alan Bennett

97. “I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.”

— Alan Bennett

98. “One does try not to be an Old Git but they don’t make it easy.”

— Alan Bennett

99. “When he dipped his cake in his tea – a disgusting business – the whole of his life came back to him. When I did it nothing happened.”

— Alan Bennett

100. “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, is a sentiment I can readily endorse. Her predicament is mine.”

— Alan Bennett