Alan Bennett Quotes

I should probably be careful admitting this, but sometimes, when my characters are having a disagreement, it's a disagreement I'm having with myself. I can see both sides of the argument.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.

I'm an incredibly emotional person, but I always feel bad about that. The work is therapy... I need to emote wildly while I write. I weep. I'll laugh, get excited, and get up and pace. I try to take the emotional journey with the characters.

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.

All of my books come from something that I happen to be working out at a given point in my life. It's kind of self-therapy.

Those artists who say that somehow therapy or analysis will thwart their creativity are completely misinformed. It's absolutely the opposite: it opens closed doors.

'Orphans' reflects unconscious elements in myself that were, at the time, indigestible and butting up against each other in my psyche; issues I wasn't really in touch with but was trying to put into a dramatic framework.

Fight with yourself when you paint, not with the model. A student is one who struggles with himself for order.

The ordinary man puts up a struggle against all that is not himself, whereas it is against himself, in a limited but all-essential field, that the artist has to battle.

You have to search the absolute demons of your soul to make a great record.

All my songs are where I am.

'Taxi Driver' wasn't autobiographical in terms of the actual events, but I did draw on my own mental state.

The bigger confrontation is the one an individual has with itself.

Yeah, I wanted to know where they got it from, what it was all about, you know, and it seemed to strike something in me that was you know rearing it's head and I still don't know what that is.

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

With 'Seven Deadly Sins,' there was a lot of personal stuff in there that I didn't even realize I'd been carrying around for awhile. And a lot of guilt involved, a lot of emotion, a lot of depression. Once I was done writing that book, I was able to really let go of that stuff.

It's such a private thing - 'my process' - I can just say that the work that I do is like therapy between me and the character.

Sometimes I feel like I have a dozen different people inside of me. I've always been that way, and I've always written stuff down.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

My life has always somehow been played out in a minor key, unresolved. Art somehow resolves things for me.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

I always write about the things that haunt me, the questions I have.