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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
Untidy
Briefing
Perpetually
Inviting
Reading
Discursive

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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.
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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