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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett
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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
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Film Director
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Screenwriter
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People
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More quotes by Alan Bennett
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
Alan Bennett
That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
Alan Bennett
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
Alan Bennett
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
Alan Bennett
There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
Alan Bennett
Art comes out of art it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
Alan Bennett
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
Alan Bennett
Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
Alan Bennett
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
Alan Bennett
I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
Alan Bennett
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
Alan Bennett
