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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.

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
Water
Would
Sahara
Men
Crawling
Like
Prefer
Across
Asking
Bits
Whether

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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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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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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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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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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.'
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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.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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