Quote

Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

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
Garlands
Shackles
Franklin
Memories

More quotes by Alan Bennett

Image
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.
Alan Bennett
Image
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
Alan Bennett
Image
Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
Alan Bennett
Image
Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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
Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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
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.
Alan Bennett
Image
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
Image
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.
Alan Bennett
Image
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Alan Bennett
Image
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Alan Bennett
Image
I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
Image
But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
Alan Bennett
Image
God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
Alan Bennett
Image
At eighty things do not occur they recur.
Alan Bennett
Image
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
Alan Bennett
Image
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett