Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennettis an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth9 May 1934
Papers like the Mail make out that people are prurient and outraged; I don't think people really care.
I'm less genial than people think, but I'm too timid to seem nasty.
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?
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
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.
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.
I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.
Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.
Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.