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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
Leisure
Purpose
Means
Nothing
Mean
Work
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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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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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
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It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
Alan Bennett
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To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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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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.
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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
Alan Bennett
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I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
Alan Bennett
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Alan Bennett
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan Bennett
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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
Alan Bennett
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My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Alan Bennett
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
Alan Bennett