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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Arranging
Competitive
Flower
Activity
Trying
Think
Thinking
Squash

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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
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...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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