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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.

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
Easier
Less
Read
Feel
Unavailable
Feels
Withdraw
Make
Selfish
Would
Pursuit
Oneself

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I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
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To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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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 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.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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...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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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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