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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

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
Passing
Books
Lives
Book
Time
World
Passings
Worlds

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan Bennett
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If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.'
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I'm conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
Alan Bennett
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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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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett