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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.

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
Sardines
Boxes
Keys
Looking
Life
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date.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.
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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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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
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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?
Alan Bennett
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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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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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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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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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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.
Alan Bennett
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What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett