J. B. Priestley Quotes
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Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
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There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.
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One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
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Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.
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Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
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Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
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The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and patience, the energy and skill, to take us voyaging to other planets, then let us use some of these to tidy up and civilize this earth. One world at a time, please.
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The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.
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I never read the life of any important person without discovering that he knew more and could do more than I could ever hope to know or do in half a dozen lifetimes.
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The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.
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What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!
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I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.
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No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith
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If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.
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If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.
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It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
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In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.
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The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
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It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.
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To put failure behind you, face up to it.
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We plan, we toil, we suffer - in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol's eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.
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A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
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I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?
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There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.
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Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be.
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There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
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In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
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We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.
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There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.
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The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?
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