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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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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Means
Nothing
Mean
Work
Like
Leisure
Purpose

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
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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.
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Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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.
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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'
Alan Bennett
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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett
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God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
Alan Bennett
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
Alan Bennett