Alan Bennett quotes

" 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. " # Fame # Memory # Love

" Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have. " # Books - Classics # Books - Reading # Literature

" I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint. I was programmed to be a novelist or a playwright. But I'm not. " # Writers and Writing # Arts and Artists # Children

" Geoff: We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules. " # Anarchism

" Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it. " # Flirting

" I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain. " # Character

" That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water. " # Involvement

" Headmaster: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment. " # Psychoanalysis

" Headmaster: Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince, with in his belt the short curved, gold sword of the Ashraf descendants of the Prophet, he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken. "Who am I?" he would cry despairingly. "You are Lawrence of Arabia" passers-by would stop him and say, "And I claim my five pounds." " # Cities and City Life

" Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists? " # Socializing and Socialism