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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.

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
Domestic
Establishment
Instinct
Panders
Understood
Catered
Already
Disliking
Within
Respectable
War
Instincts
Never
Scope

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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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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...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.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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 [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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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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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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