J. B. Priestley quotes
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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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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?”
-- J. B. PriestleySource : "Garden Witchery : Magick from the Ground Up". Book by by Ellen Dugan, p. 206, 2003.
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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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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 catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.”
-- J. B. PriestleySource : Good Companions (1929) bk. 1, ch. 1
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“Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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?”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer's race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. … I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame… I was utterly at a loss how to account for it.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.”
-- J. B. PriestleySource : J. B. Priestley (1992). “An Inspector Calls”, p.56, Heinemann
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“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“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, we feel, a decent area somewhere between boiled carrots and Beluga caviare, sour plonk and Chateau Lafitte, where we can take care of our gullets and bellies without worshipping them.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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 an ally. Mine has been tobacco.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”
-- J. B. PriestleySource : J. B. Priestley (1992). “An Inspector Calls”, p.56, Heinemann
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“Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“One of the delights beyond the grasp of youth is that of Not Going. Not to have an invitation for the dance, the party, the picnic, the excursion is to be diminished. To have an invitation and then not to be able to go -- oh cursed spite! Now I do not care the rottenest fig whether I receive an invitation or not. After years of illusion, I finally decided I was missing nothing by Not Going. I no longer care whether I am missing anything or not.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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 warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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 stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us - the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we'll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“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 into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“We complain and complain, but we have lived and seen the blossom -apple, pear, cherry, plum, almond blossom - in the sun; and the best among us cannot pretend they deserve - or could contrive - anything better.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
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“It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley -
“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.”
-- J. B. Priestley
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