List of Alan Bennett Quotes

It [cambridge] Wasn't A Holy Grail In The Sense That I'd Never Been To Cambridge. But Then, When I Did Go, The Contrast Between Leeds, Which Was Very Black And Sooty In Those Days, And Cambridge, Which Seemed Like Something Out Of A Fairystory, In The Grip Of A Hard Frost, Was Just Wonderful.

...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.

I'm For The Freedom Of Expression, Given That It Will Be Under Strict Control.

Deluded Liberal That I Am, I Persist In Thinking That Those With A Streak Of Sexual Unorthodoxy Ought To Be More Tolerant Of Their Fellows Than Those Who Lead An Entirely Godly, Righteous And Sober Life. Illogically, I Tend To Assume That If You ( Philip Larkin) Dream Of Caning Schoolgirls Bottoms, It Disqualifies You From Dismissing Half The Nation As Work-shy.

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.

Cloisters, Ancient Libraries ... I Was Confusing Learning With The Smell Of Cold Stone.

Had Your Forefathers, Wigglesworth, Been As Stupid As You Are, The Human Race Would Never Have Succeeded In Procreating Itself.

Why Do We Not Care To Acknowledge Them? The Cattle, The Body Count. We Still Don't Like To Admit The War Was Even Partly Our Fault Because So Many Of Our People Died. A Photograph On Every Mantlepiece. And All This Mourning Has Veiled The Truth. It's Not So Much Lest We Forget, As Lest We Remember. Because You Should Realise The Cenotaph And The Last Post And All That Stuff Is Concerned, There's No Better Way Of Forgetting Something Than By Commemorating It.

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.

Nature Played A Cruel Trick On Her By Giving Her A Waxed Mustache.

But Most Men Regard Their Life As A Poem That Women Threaten. They May Not Have Two Spondees To Rub Together But They Still Want To Pen Their Saga Untrammelled By Life-threatening Activities Like Trailing Round Sainsbury's, Emptying The Dishwasher Or Going To The Nativity Play.

Have You Ever Thought, Headmaster, That Your Standards Might Perhaps Be A Little Out Of Date? Of Course They're Out Of Date. Standards Are Always Out Of Date.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.