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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
School
Twentieth
Good
Thread
Never
Runs
Like
Century
Sappers
Class
Tweed
Literature
Practitioners
Dies
Snobbery
Running
Breed

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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.
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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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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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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.
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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.
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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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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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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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