Famous Quotes by Alan Bennett

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.”

Life is rather like a tin of sardines—we're all of us looking for the key.

Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you had thought special and peculiar to you.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially solitary person.

The greatest work of art is the life we lead.

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

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.

You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.

If you think squatting is not glamorous, you have never seen a squat with chandeliers.

It’s rather like a mother who gives herself endless reasons why the child shouldn’t be given the push, because there are a thousand reasons for keeping him, even though he’s awful.

If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t get married.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.

All the books I've read, and those I haven’t read—they’re all part of my library, whether I read them or not.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

Sometimes there is no way to make the absurd reasonable.

Sometimes there is no future. There is only the postponed past.

We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones.

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

When I was small I thought words could only mean what they said, now I know they mean what we think they say.

Our lives are, at times, overlaid with the wish for something else, something quite different.