Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett Photographs

Alan Bennett Quotes You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”

Alan Bennett Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. 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.

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.

Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

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

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.
Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”

I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?

Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

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.

But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.”

God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!

"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity.”
I don't see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry's about hasn't happened to us yet.
HECTOR: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you're dying. We're making your deathbeds here, boys.
LOCKWOOD: Fucking Ada.
HECTOR: Poetry is the trailer! Forthcoming attractions!”


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.”

Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

Alan Bennett on Libraries of a Lifetime

Alan Bennett on libraries of a lifetime
I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there. A scene that seems to crop up regularly in plays that I have written has a character, often a young man, standing in front of a bookcase feeling baffled. He – and occasionally she – is overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that has been written and the ground to be covered. “All these books. I’ll never catch up,” wails the young Joe Orton in the film script of Prick Up Your Ears, and in The Old Country another young man reacts more dramatically, by hurling half the books to the floor. In Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf someone else gives vent to their frustration with literature by drawing breasts on a photograph of Virginia Woolf and kitting out EM Forster with a big cigar. Orton notoriously defaced library books before starting to write books himself. This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in.

The first library I did find my way into was the Armley Public Library in Leeds where a reader’s ticket cost tuppence in 1940; not tuppence a time or even tuppence a year but just tuppence; that was all you ever had to pay. It was rather a distinguished building, put up in 1901, the architect Percy Robinson, and amazingly for Leeds, which is and always has been demolition-crazy, it survives and is still used as a library, though whether it will survive the present troubles I don’t like to think.

We would be there as a family, my mother and father, my brother and me, and it would be one of our regular weekly visits. I had learnt to read quite early when I was five or six by dint, it seemed to me then, of watching my brother read. We both of us read comics but whereas I was still on picture-based comics like the Dandy and the Beano, my brother, who was three years older, had graduated to the more text-based Hotspur and Wizard. Having finished my Dandy I would lie down on the carpet beside him and gaze at what he was reading, asking him questions about it and generally making a nuisance of myself. Then – and it seemed as instantaneous as this – one day his comic made sense and I could read. I’m sure it must have been more painstaking than this but not much more.

The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in stained glass which by 1941 was just beginning to buckle. Ahead was the Adults’ Library, lofty, airy and inviting; to the right was the Junior Library, a low dark room made darker by the books which, regardless of their contents, had been bound in heavy boards of black, brown or maroon embossed with the stamp of Leeds Public Libraries. This grim packaging was discouraging to a small boy who had just begun to read, though more discouraging still was the huge and ill-tempered, walrus-moustached British Legion commissionaire who was permanently installed there. The image of General Hindenburg, who was pictured on the stamps in my brother’s album, he had lost one or other of his limbs in the trenches, but since he seldom moved from his chair and just shouted it was difficult to tell which.

The books I best remember reading there were the Dr Dolittle stories of Hugh Lofting, which were well represented and (an important consideration) of which there were always more. I think I knew even at six years old that a doctor who could talk to animals was fiction but at the same time I thought the setting of the stories, Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, was a real place set in historical time with the doctor (and Lofting’s own illustrations of the doctor) having some foundation in fact. Shreds of this belief clung on because when, years later, having recorded some of Lofting’s stories for the BBC, I met his son, I found I still had the feeling that his father had been not quite an ordinary mortal.

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett talking to the Duchess of Cornwall at a reception she hosted at Clarence House to promote National Storytelling Week.

Alan Bennett was keen to talk to the Duchess of Cornwall at a reception she hosted at Clarence House to promote National Storytelling Week. The playwright admits, however, that he is struggling to come up with tales of his own.

Bennett is the author of the celebrated series of television monologues Talking Heads. "They just came to me and I could do them," he says. "I can't do them now. I think, 'Oh, crikey, I'll never be able to do that again.'

"People think your life's work is like a cushion and you can recline on it as you get older. It's not like that. You can take comfort in what you've done, but it doesn't stop you wanting to go on and do more, particularly with the monologues."

Bennett, 76, who is a favourite of Camilla's husband, the Prince of Wales, compares his plight to that of the poet Philip Larkin. "It reminds me of Larkin," he says. "He said poetry gave him up towards the end of his life – and I think the same thing has happened to me with monologues."

The author of The History Boys, he is keen to promote its teaching. "The notion of scrapping history as a subject is just mad," he says. "If Tony Blair had more of a sense of history, it would have deterred him from going into Afghanistan and Iraq."

Alan Bennett Quotes"Life is generally something that happens elsewhere. "

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

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

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

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

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

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

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

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

My films are about embarrassment.

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.

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

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

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

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett reads "The Greening of Mrs Donalds."

The Greening of Mrs Donaldson

Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to take in two lodgers, her mundane life becomes much more stimulating …

"The Shielding of Mrs Forbes"by Alan Bennett.

The Shielding of Mrs Forbes

Graham Forbes is a disappointment to his mother, who thinks that if he must have a wife, he should have done better. Though her own husband isn’t all that satisfactory either. Still, this is Alan Bennett, so what is happening in the bedroom (and in lots of other places too) is altogether more startling, perhaps shocking, and ultimately more true to people’s predilections.