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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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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Literature
Practitioners
Dies
Snobbery
Running
Breed
School
Twentieth
Good
Thread
Never
Runs
Like
Century
Sappers
Class
Tweed

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
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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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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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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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.
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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.
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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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I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
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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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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
Alan Bennett