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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?

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
Emptier
Closer
Grass
Ground
Children

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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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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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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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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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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.
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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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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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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
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