Alan Bennett Quotes

• Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reading

• My claim to literary fame is that I used to deliver meat to a woman who became T. S. Eliot ‘s mother-in-law.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• They’re going to have to be made to sit up and take notice. They’re going to have to be made to realise who we are. My father had a chain of dry cleaners.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I want a future that will live up to my past.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I’m going to throw caution to the winds and have a sweet sherry.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• One of the few things I have learned in life is that there is invariably something odd about women who wear ankle socks.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I’ve never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Life is rather like a tin of sardines—we’re all of us looking for the key.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

• A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Books, Inspiration

• The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Books, Reading

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

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Happiness

• 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 the nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Inspirational, Life

  Tags in People

• You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Books

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

  Alan Bennett

  Topics in Life

Alan Bennett (35)

Birth:	9th May, 1934
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Actor, Author, Playwriter, Screenwriter

About

Alan Bennett is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full-time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968. His output includes The Madness of George III and its film incarnation The Madness of King George, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh.

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Births

• 1952 - Lorna Luft
• 1912 - Eleanor Powell
• 1870 - Alexander Berkman
• 1962 - Steven Curtis Chapman
• 1937 - Marlo Thomas

Deaths

• 1958 - Mel Ott
• 1922 - Ricardo Flores Magon
• 1969 - Norman Lindsay
• 2000 - Sir Cyril Astley Clarke
• 1945 - Robert Benchley