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Of course my standards are out of date!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
Actor
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
Alan Bennett
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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
Alan Bennett
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...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
Alan Bennett
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
Alan Bennett
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
Alan Bennett
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Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
Alan Bennett
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Alan Bennett
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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
Alan Bennett
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
Alan Bennett
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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
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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!
Alan Bennett