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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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f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
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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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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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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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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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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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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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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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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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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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My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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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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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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
Alan Bennett