Quotes from Alan Bennett

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.

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

I don't believe in private education.

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.

Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.

I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.

...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.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.

I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

I can't complain that I've had a public all through my writing life, but people don't quite know what I've written. People don't read you too closely. Perhaps, after I've died, they'll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there's more in it. That may be wrong, but that's what I comfort myself with.

Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.

I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.