Alan Bennett
English playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, essayist and actor.
Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Golightly: Call me Fingers.
Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
"Then I want to end up 'Norwich. Well it's an epigrammatic way of saying 'Knickers off ready when I come home."
I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.
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.
Geoff: We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things.
"The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize."
"Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."
Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.
Counsel: [You are charged with] loitering to commit a felony. Now then Mr Golightly...
Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.
Headmaster: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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.
He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.
One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.
Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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.