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

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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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Art comes out of art it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Our father the novelist my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages - just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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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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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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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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