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

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Soon
Took
Humanity
Quite
Children
Never
Unremitting
Cheesy
Dickens

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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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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.
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I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
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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.
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I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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.
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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.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
Alan Bennett