Arnold Bennett (1867–1931,) fully Enoch Arnold Bennett, was an English novelist, dramatist, critic, and essayist. He is best known for his novels of the Potteries (‘the Five Towns,’) which portray provincial middle-class society in the industrial Midlands, England.
Born near Hanley, Staffordshire, Bennett became a solicitor’s assistant in London, but soon took up journalism, edited the journal Woman, and experimented with narrative prose. The Grand Babylon Hotel and Anna of the Five Towns, in realist and sensationalist styles respectively, were published more or less simultaneously in 1902.
In 1902, Bennett moved to Paris, where he wrote his masterpiece of realism, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908,) and the first volumes of the Clayhanger trilogy—Clayhanger (1910) and Hilda Lessways (1911.) In 1912, Bennett resettled permanently in England. His enormously popular play, The Great Adventure (1913,) was based on his novel Buried Alive (1908.)
During World War I, Bennett was active as a political propagandist and a civil servant, besides keeping up his other writing. The last Clayhanger novel, These Twain, appeared in 1916. In the postwar period, Bennett was idolized in both the literary and social scenes; he satirized the latter in Lord Raingo (1926.) Riceyman Steps (1923,) a portrayal of miserliness, was his last masterpiece.
Bennett was also an influential critic, and as ‘Jacob Tonson’ on The New Age, he was a discerning reviewer. His Journals, written in the manner of the French critics, the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, were published posthumously.
The “Arnold Bennett Omelet,” usually with smoked haddock, cheddar cheese, and cream, is named in Bennett’s honor. It was created at London’s Savoy Grill, where Bennett was a frequent post-theatre patron.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Arnold Bennett
All wrong doing is done in the sincere belief that it is the best thing to do.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Mistakes
If egotism means a terrific interest in one’s self, egotism is absolutely essential to efficient living.
—Arnold Bennett
Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Change
Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Hell
You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of un-manufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No one can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Time Management, Time
The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one’s sympathy the gloom of somebody else.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Worry, Understanding
In search of ideas I spent yesterday morning in walking about, and went to the stores and bought things in four departments. A wonderful and delightful way of spending time. I think this sort of activity does stimulate creative ideas.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Ideas
The price of justice is eternal publicity.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Justice
Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Character
To the artist is sometimes granted a sudden, transient insight which serves in this matter for experience. A flash, and where previously the brain held a dead fact, the soul grasps a living truth! At moments we are all artists.
—Arnold Bennett
The war years count double. Things and people not actively in use age twice as fast.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Aging
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Pessimism
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
A sense of the value of time … is an essential preliminary to efficient work; it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Time Management
We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going day in and out. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Value of Time, Time Management, Productivity, Time
Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Happiness
Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her; she knows by a process of the intellect; but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin’s lot.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Sex
Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness. If men and women practiced mental calisthenics as they do physical calisthenics, they would purge their brains of this foolishness.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Worry
Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Confidence, Assurance, Goals, Success & Failure, Achievement, Accomplishment
Always behave as if nothing had happened no matter what has happened.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Manners
It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Pleasure
It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship, Judgment
We need a sense of the value of time—that is, of the best way to divide one’s time into one’s various activities.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Planning
The real tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort, who never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Effort
The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise the world would begin to turn the other way round.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: The Past
No mind, however loving, could bear to see plainly into all the recesses of another mind.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: The Mind
The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Travel
Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Reading, Books
The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of 24 hours is the calm realization of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Life
Well, my deliberate opinion is – it’s a jolly strange world.
—Arnold Bennett
Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Creativity
There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.
—Arnold Bennett
The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them; and the child has a very great deal to teach them.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Parents
A first-rate Organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Planning
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Intelligence
Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own.
—Arnold Bennett
Topics: Patience
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Israel Zangwill English Writer, Political Activist
Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
Graham Greene British Novelist
Dodie Smith British Novelist
Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
Agatha Christie British Novelist
Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
H. G. Wells English Novelist, Historian
Beryl Bainbridge British Novelist
Mary Elizabeth Braddon English Novelist