Quote

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.

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
Life
Sunday
People
Crisis
Majority
Nobody
Falters
Looking
Afternoons
Spirit
Spotlight
Wells
Afternoon
Well
Perform

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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 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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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, Can I be excused the Crucifixion? No!
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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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've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
Alan Bennett
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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
Alan Bennett
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
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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
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
Alan Bennett