Quote

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.

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
Life
Primarily
Substance
Suppose
Concerned
Taking
Reality
Work
Really
Pith

More quotes by Alan Bennett

Image
Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Alan Bennett
Image
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
Image
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
Image
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.
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
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
Image
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
Alan Bennett
Image
Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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
The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
Alan Bennett
Image
It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
Alan Bennett
Image
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.
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
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.
Alan Bennett
Image
Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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
Image
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
Image
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
Image
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
Image
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
Alan Bennett