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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
Discursive
Untidy
Briefing
Perpetually
Inviting
Reading

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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
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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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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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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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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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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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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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