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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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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.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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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.
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Art comes out of art it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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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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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.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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