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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

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
Humanity
Quite
Children
Never
Unremitting
Cheesy
Dickens
Soon
Took

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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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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
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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.
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God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
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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
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Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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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.
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... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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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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I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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