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Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
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Writer
Always
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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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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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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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
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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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... 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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett