J. B. Priestley Quotes

62 quotes in 1073 categories

• To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and…
• In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
• 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…
• But some of us are beginning to pull well away, in our irritation, from...the exquisite tasters, the vintage snobs, the three-star Michelin gourmets. There is,…
• Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.
• Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs…
• 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.…
• The world we know at present is in no fit state to take over the dreariest little meteor ... If we have the courage and…
• 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…
• Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
• The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological…
• 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…
• The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.
• But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is the whole…
• We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit…
• Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.
• A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.
• Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
• Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
• The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.

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