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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.

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
Already
Closes
Courses
Prompts
Course
Convictions
Books
Seldom
Sure
Conviction
Action
Generally
Unwittingly
Book
Decided
Prompt
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'
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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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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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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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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.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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 lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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