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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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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Assume
Always
Sexual
Assuming
Parents
Parent
Grinding
Lives
Halt
Come
Conception
Children

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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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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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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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.'
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f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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