Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennettis an English playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth9 May 1934
Papers like the Mail make out that people are prurient and outraged; I don't think people really care.
He says some things which are taken as gospel, when they ought to be disputed. When he writes 'Courage is no good / It means not scaring others', you want to say that just isn't true. There is more to courage than that.
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.
Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York, I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease, even, so that if I start off undressed, I have nowhere to go.
I'm more socialist certainly than New Labour - I'm very old Labour, really.
I don't want to see libraries close; I want to find local solutions that will make them sustainable.
I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.
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.
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 have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.
Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.
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.
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.