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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date.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.

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
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Screenwriter
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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Our father the novelist my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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