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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

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Ideas
Expected
Really
Forgotten
Never
Masters
Like
Nobody
Either
Irwin
Idea
Hector
Experience
Exam
School
Scholarship

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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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It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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.
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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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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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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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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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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What I'm above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that's it really: I'm taking the pith out of reality.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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