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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

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Convinced
Type
Trousers
Taking
Practise
Cases
Diagnosis
Longer
Involve
Science
Physicians
Two
Types
Medicine

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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.
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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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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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I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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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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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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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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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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.
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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.
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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
Alan Bennett