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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

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
Never
Would
Forefathers
Succeeded
Stupid
Race
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Human
Humans

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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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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
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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.
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If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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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.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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