Quote

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.'

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
Would
David
Hare
Life
Bent
Hares
Like
Instance
Blocked
Thoughts
Coat
Steps
Toms
Hanger
Doubt
Coats
Excrement
Doesn
Sink
Hangers
Moments
Occur
Rooting

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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.
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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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.
Alan Bennett
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To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
Alan Bennett
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
Alan Bennett
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
Alan Bennett
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett
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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
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My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
Alan Bennett