Alan Bennett

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.

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.

Im for the freedom of expression given that it will be under strict control.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

I always like to break out and address the audience. In 'The History Boys', for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up.

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

I don't believe in private education.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

My films are about embarrassment.

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.

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

Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.

The bits I most remember about my school days are those that took place outside the classroom, as we were taken on countless theatre visits and trips to places of interest.

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

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

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.

If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

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.

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

Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

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

I always feel over-appreciated but underestimated.

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

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.

I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.

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

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

Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

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.

Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.

Brought up in the provinces in the forties and fifties one learned early the valuable lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

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.

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.