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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.

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

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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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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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'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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Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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If, for instance, we'd made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it. We didn't have to do any alterations for Broadway. I was supposed to go a fortnight before it opened to alter anything that was necessary and there was nothing really.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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It [Cambridge] wasn't a holy grail in the sense that I'd never been to Cambridge. But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
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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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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.
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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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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
Alan Bennett