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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

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
Reading
Discursive
Untidy
Briefing
Perpetually
Inviting

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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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 don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.
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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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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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... 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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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett