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Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.

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
Education
Right
Long
Like
Polly
Socialists
Sex
Pay

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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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.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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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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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 turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
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