James Agate Quotes

19 quotes in 245 categories

• New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
• Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.
• The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
• A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his…
• The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.
• In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael.
• This was an actress who, for twenty years, had the world at her feet. She kicked it away, and the ball rolled out of her…
• The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an…
• I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is…
• The worst of failure of this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.
• My mind is not a bed to be made and remade.
• Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.
• I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere…
• Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.
• Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.
• Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll at once…
• All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits…
• My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

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