233 Quotes by Alan Bennett

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

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

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

Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.

I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.

I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.

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