J. B. Priestley Quotes
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
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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.
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Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.
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The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.
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Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.
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Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.
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Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
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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.
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I have lived longer than you. I have thought more, and I have suffered more. And I tell you there is more truth to the fundamental nature of things in the most foolish fairy tales than there is in any of your complaints against life.
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Western man is schizophrenic.
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The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
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There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.
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The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
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I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.
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If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
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To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
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We pay when old for the excesses of youth.