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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

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Point
Meets
Never
Shore
Sea
None
Ocean
Except
Land
Seen

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
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What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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Art comes out of art it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
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I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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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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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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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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