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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
Argument
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Incoherent
Good
Fallible
People
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Suited
Precise
Plays
Mouths
More quotes by Alan Bennett
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
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
There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
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
I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
Alan Bennett
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett
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.'
Alan Bennett
I'm not happy but I'm not unhappy about it.
Alan Bennett