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Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
Alan Bennett
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
Alan Bennett
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don't.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett
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... 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
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You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
Alan Bennett
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
Alan Bennett
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
Alan Bennett
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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
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At eighty things do not occur they recur.
Alan Bennett
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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.
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.
Alan Bennett