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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
Never
Masters
Like
Nobody
Either
Irwin
Idea
Hector
Experience
Exam
School
Scholarship
Ideas
Expected
Really
Forgotten

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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f they'd been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn't have known they were born if they'd not towed the line!
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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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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
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I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett