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My films are about embarrassment.

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
Embarrassment
Films
Film

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Of course my standards are out of date!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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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.
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But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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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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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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
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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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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
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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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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.
Alan Bennett
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
Alan Bennett
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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 seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett