Alan Bennett Quotes

I'm a big fan of the poet Mary Jo Salter, and although she doesn't need to be discovered at all - she's widely admired and anthologized and extremely accomplished - I wish she were a household name.

It's sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

My mother is a good woman - a very good woman - and I am, I think, not quite all criminality, but we do not pull together. I am a piece of machinery which, not understanding, my mother winds up the wrong way, setting all the wheels of my composition going in creaking discord.

... my daughter McKenna thought I sang with the Everly Brothers ... I said, 'no I was one of the Righteous Brothers' and she said 'didn't they invent the airplane?'

Of course I've enjoyed having the Nobel Prize, the prestige that goes along with it, the money that came with it in particular. I was the typical, still am to some extent, impecunious writer, just struggling to make ends meet, so that, nobody's going to deny that at all. In fact, if they want to give it to me a second time, I'm standing by, ready to receive it, but it's a problem, it's a real problem and then expectations and then you have monsters like Sani Abacha who come up from time to time and who would have died a happy man if he'd succeeded in hanging a Nobel Laureate for literature.

As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy - happier - today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.

Parents just don't understand.

This was always the problem with my mother and me, I suddenly realized. There were so many things we thought we agreed on, but anythign can have two meanings. Like sides of a coin, it just matters how it falls.

As far as I was concerned, we'd come to a draw: I hadn't wanted to come, and she didn't want me to leave. We were even. But I knew my mother wouldn't see it that way. Lately, we didn't seem to see anything the same.

Life was hard on mothers; but then, they just didn't understand.

And this must be Avery?" "Oh, God, no," Cam said. "This is Candy, Mom." His mother's eyes widened and a bit of color infused her cheeks. "Uh, I'm..." "I'm Avery," I said, shooting Cam a look. "You had it right." She spun around, smacking Cam across the arm. Hard, too. "Cameron! Oh my God. I thought..." She smacked him again and he laughed. "You're terrible.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

Mothers ... would do anything to steer their daughter the right way. It is frustrating beyond measure for them when a daughter screams, 'You don't understand, and you'll never understand!' The mother stamps her foot in aggravation, but in this case the daughter is right: the mother doesn't understand. She merely remembers, and memory is separate from experience.

Don't keep telling your parents they don't understand you. Believe me it's much worse when they do. There's just a chance, you know - they really might.

I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, "That's nice - and when are you going to see me next?"

My mother gave me an Oscar de la Renta Gone with the Wind ballgown dress. I've never had a place to wear it out to because it's so old-fashioned fancy and beautiful, so I need to find a place to wear it but if I don't, I'll still keep it forever.

At certain times, men regard poetry merely as a bright flame, but to women it was, and always will be, a warm fire.

You know people. Most of them don’t hear anything. Those who hear - don’t listen. A few who listen - don’t understand. And those who could understand… they don’t care.

One of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads - often theories that are critical of others - that they won't test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people's backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation.

Coach," Annabeth said, "it was an accident. We were talking, and we fell asleep." "Besides," Percy said, "you're starting to sound like Terminus." Hedge narrowed his eyes. "Is that an insult, Jackson? 'Cause I'll-I'll Terminus you, buddy!

You tried to slide his original curse back onto him?” Al said in wonder. “At the restaurant? And I stopped you? Sweet mother pus bucket!” he exclaimed, and I swear, dust sifted from the ceiling. “Rachel, we have to work on this communication thing.

And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.

The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.