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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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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Humanity
Literature
Wells
Might
Well
Queen
Queens

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
Alan Bennett
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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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I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
Alan Bennett
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
Alan Bennett
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
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The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.
Alan Bennett
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
Alan Bennett
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
Alan Bennett
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
Alan Bennett
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It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
Alan Bennett