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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.

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
Favour
Provided
Kept
Expression
Control
Free
Business
Rigidly

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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
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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 think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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Our father the novelist my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
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I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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