Quote

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

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
People
Vicars
Sleeves
Mention
Puts
Keep
Long

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
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I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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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.
Alan Bennett
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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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett