Writing Home Quotes

“...But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Buses have never inspired the same affection - too comfortable and cushioned to have a moral dimension. Trams were bare and bony, transport reduced to its basic elements, and they had a song to sing, which buses never did. I was away at university when they started to phase them out, Leeds as always in too much of a hurry to get to the future, and so doing the wrong thing. I knew at the time that it was a mistake, just as Beeching was a mistake, and that life is starting to get nastier. If trams ever come back, though, they should come back not as curiosities, nor, God help us, as part of the heritage, but as a cheap and sensible way of getting from point A to point B, and with a bit of poetry thrown in. ”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“30 November. My dustbin has been on its last legs for some time, and after the binmen have called this morning I find no trace of it. Never having heard of tautology, the binmen have put the dustbin in the dustbin.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Much comment on Mrs T.’s courage the next morning, when she arrives at the Conservative conference on the dot, but it’s not difficult to appear calm and unruffled in such circumstances, as any actor could tell you. 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.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“You must please remember,' [Kenneth Grahame] wrote: 'that a theme, a thesis, is in most cases little more than a sort of clothes line on which one pegs a string of ideas, quotations, allusions and so on, one's mental undergarments of all shapes and sizes, some possibly fairly new but most rather old and patched; and they dance and sway in the breeze and flap and flutter, or hang limp and lifeless; and some are ordinary enough, and some are of a private and intimate shape, and rather give the owner away, and show up his or her peculiarities. And owing to the invisible clothes line they seem to have some connexion and continuity.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Seagulls yelp over the empty streets and mount each other on chimneystacks this grey Sunday while boys in baggy trousers phone possible girls from shattered phone boxes.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one's movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Arriving at the hotel, like leaving it, was fraught with anxiety: there was always the question of ‘the tip’. Dad would probably have his shilling ready before he’d even signed the register, and when the porter had shown them up to their room would give it to him, as often as not misjudging the moment, not waiting till his final departure but slipping it to him while he was still demonstrating what facilities the room had to offer – the commodious wardrobe, the luxurious bathroom – so the tip came as an unwelcome interruption. Once the potentially dangerous procedure of arrival had been got through, the luggage fetched up, the porter endowed with his shilling, and the door finally closed, my parents’ apprehension gave way to huge relief – it was as if they’d bluffed their way into the enemy camp, and relief gave way to giggles as they explored the delights of the place. ‘Come look in here, Dad. It’s a spanking place – there’s umpteen towels.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“Then down into Giggleswick to a silly supper and a game of Trivial Pursuit. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home

“and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including one of the economist G. D. H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, ‘And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G. D. H. Dole.’ Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, ‘Cole not Dole.’ In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.”
― Alan Bennett, Writing Home