Alan Bennett Quotes

I always feel like everything I shoot is a student project, and nobody else knows about it. I forget, in the moment, that other people will see it.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Your intention for a book is never the same as the reception.

I had to sell my house and make a lot of sacrifices to become a writer, and it sucks not to get taken seriously.

We don't really make bad records, though some people might like some more than others. And we have never really done a bad show. So I think in a way maybe we've been taken for granted.

If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.

I think I belong to America's last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

I wrote a great deal... but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.

Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.

In the '80s, I was putting out an album virtually every year, I think mostly based on fear - that if I didn't, people would soon forget about me.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

'Wild at Heart' created a set of expectations maybe, partly, on my part, certainly on my publisher's part, but also in the world out there, that my next books would be as remarkable.

As far as the world was concerned, from 1979 to 1996, I didn't publish any original material; it just wasn't there.

I'm not deluded enough to think that everyone who knows my name is a listener. You know, I hope that part of that interest - part of that public interest - has to do with me still making records that people like.

I had a hard time publishing my books in the beginning of my career, because editors were afraid what people would think of THEM, personally, if their name was associated with me.

I don't really read reviews... That's not where my attention goes.

As screenwriters, we struggle with our own success. We have wallpapered our world and now we can't get anyone to notice the picture we just hung.

There is a broad range of reaction to the work, as there is a broad range of work I make.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool - and I'm not any of those - to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

I was just dreaming, and if, if I'd written the book and nobody wanted it, I would have put it in the drawer and said, 'Well, I did that.'

Everyone's so used to taking care of actors and directors, but people in the crew are there the longest and working the hardest.

I know that people hate me. And I know I'm just a hack journalist and what we do on 'Lifestyles' isn't what you would call television brain surgery.

I'm very happy with the response for everything I've done, but, you know, sometimes you get things like, 'Oh, 'Spaced' Series One wasn't as good as 'Spaced' Series Two.' Or 'Shaun of the Dead' is not as good as 'Spaced,' or, 'Hot Fuzz' is not as good as 'Shaun.' Or, now, 'The World's End' is not 'Shaun of the Dead.'