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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.

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
Good
Fallible
People
Coherent
Suited
Precise
Plays
Mouths
Argument
Play
Incoherent

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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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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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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I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.
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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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I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
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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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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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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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