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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.

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
Find
Going
Woolf
Way
Sights
Roses
Virginia
Rose
Sight
Born

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Standards are always out of date. That's 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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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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.
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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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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
Alan Bennett
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
Alan Bennett
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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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I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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.
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
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
Alan Bennett