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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
Expression
Control
Free
Business
Rigidly
Favour
Provided
Kept

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
Alan Bennett
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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
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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.
Alan Bennett
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
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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
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
Alan Bennett
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
Alan Bennett
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Alan Bennett
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
Alan Bennett
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
Alan Bennett
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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!
Alan Bennett