Alan Bennett Quotes

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Alan Bennett

Profession : Dramatist

Birth : May 9, 1934

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

Alan Bennett

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.

Alan Bennett

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

Alan Bennett

My films are about embarrassment.

Alan Bennett

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

Alan Bennett

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.

Alan Bennett

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.

Alan Bennett

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.

Alan Bennett

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

Alan Bennett

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

Alan Bennett

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

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

Alan Bennett

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.

Alan Bennett

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.

Alan Bennett

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

Alan Bennett

I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.

Alan Bennett

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

I don't believe in private education.

Alan Bennett

The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

Alan Bennett

I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.

Alan Bennett