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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

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
Reads
Duty
Public
Pleasure

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
Alan Bennett
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
Alan Bennett
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
Alan Bennett
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.
Alan Bennett
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
Alan Bennett
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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
Alan Bennett
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
Alan Bennett
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I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.
Alan Bennett
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
Alan Bennett
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I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett