J. B. Priestley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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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. Priestley -
“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 -
“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 -
“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. Priestley -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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
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