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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
Like
Nobody
Either
Irwin
Idea
Hector
Experience
Exam
School
Scholarship
Ideas
Expected
Really
Forgotten
Never
Masters
More quotes by Alan Bennett
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
Alan Bennett
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
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
Alan Bennett
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett
My films are about embarrassment.
Alan Bennett
... Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.
Alan Bennett
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
Alan Bennett
Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
Alan Bennett
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.
Alan Bennett