Alan Bennett Quotes

A life varies in social importance. We set most value on the life of a child.

...all women dress like their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man ever does. That is his.

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

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.

Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.

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

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

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.

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.

Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We are all looking for a key.

"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. And 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 best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.