Alan Bennett

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere. ”

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use. ”

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. ”