Quote

I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.

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
Call
Power
Character
Mean
Refrain
Lack
English

More quotes by 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.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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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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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.
Alan Bennett
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My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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.
Alan Bennett
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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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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
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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.
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.
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.
Alan Bennett