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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.

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
Stones
Ancient
Cold
Cloisters
Learning
Libraries
Confusing
Stone
Smell
Library

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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.
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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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...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.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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