Quote

Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

Alan Bennett

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Queens
Humanity
Literature
Wells
Might
Well
Queen

More quotes by Alan Bennett

Image
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
Alan Bennett
Image
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Alan Bennett
Image
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
Image
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
Image
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
Alan Bennett
Image
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
Alan Bennett
Image
...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.
Alan Bennett
Image
At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'
Alan Bennett
Image
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
Image
Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
Alan Bennett
Image
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
Image
I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
Image
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett
Image
The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.
Alan Bennett
Image
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.
Alan Bennett
Image
I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
Alan Bennett
Image
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett
Image
I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
Alan Bennett
Image
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
Alan Bennett
Image
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Alan Bennett