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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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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Cold
Tin
Full
Bald
Alone
Seat
Read
Seats
Fats
Birthday
Loud
Sin
Cistern

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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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.
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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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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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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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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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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.
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