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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
Rigidly
Favour
Provided
Kept
Expression
Control
Free
Business
More quotes by Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan Bennett
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
Alan Bennett
If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.
Alan Bennett
The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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
That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
Alan Bennett
I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
Alan Bennett
To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
Alan Bennett
...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.
Alan Bennett
Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Alan Bennett
