Alan Bennett

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

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

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

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.

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.

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

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 don't believe in private education.

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

I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.