J. B. Priestley Quotes (48 Quotes)

Western man is schizophrenic.

A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticising and trying to improve him.

In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

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.

If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.

Our great-grandchildren, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat . . . may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.

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.

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

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.

To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.

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.

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.

A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part - sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn't buy a better grumbling outfit.

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.

I remember coming across him at the Grand Canyon and finding him peevish, refusing to admire it or even look at it properly. He was jealous of it.

Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.

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.

Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

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.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

They will review a book by a writer much older than themselves as if it were an over-ambitious essay by a second-year student . . . It is the little dons I complain about, like so many corgis trotting up, hoping to nip your ankles.

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.

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.

When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old. I missed out coming and going.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He doesn't exist.

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.

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

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?

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.

Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.

Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.