Alan Bennett People Quotations

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

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

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.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

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.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

Papers like the Mail make out that people are prurient and outraged; I don't think people really care.