J. B. Priestley Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To multiply your joy, count your blessings.

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.

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.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Western man is schizophrenic.

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.

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

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

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

I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

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.

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.

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

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.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

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.

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.

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

What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!

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.

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.

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.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

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.

We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.