Alan Bennett: Fuck

18 August. Watching the run-through of the touring version of People at the National I reflect that there isn’t much swearing in my plays. I imagine the characters in a play by Mark Ravenhill, say, get through more ‘fucks’ in the first five minutes than there are in my entire oeuvre. The first time I wrote ‘fuck’ in a script was in my second play, Getting On, and Kenneth More, who was the star (and swore all the time himself), refused to say it on the understandable grounds that it would reduce the takings at the matinées, and since he was on a percentage this mattered.

From Alan Bennett's 2013 diary, London Review Of Books.