J. B. Priestley Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

I suppose — in the last resort — you trust life — or you don't. Well — I don't. There's something malicious... corrupt... cruel... at the heart of it. We don't belong. We're a mistake.

J. B. Priestley
The Theatre is no place to think in. You can think much better quietly at home. An intelligent book will make more people think than the most exquisite production of the finest play. But what the dramatist can do... is to make his audience feel.

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
This is the age, among things, of chocolate.

J. B. Priestley
In plain words; now that Britain has told the world 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. This is not pacifism. There is no suggestion here of abandoning the immediate defence of this island... No, what should be abandoned is the idea of deterrence-by-threat-of-retaliation. There is no real security in it, no decency in it, no faith, hope, nor charity in it.

J. B. Priestley
Find a street without a flower, and you may be sure that there the English are in exile, still hoping and planning behind the lace curtain and the aspidistra for a time and place that will break into living blossom.

J. B. Priestley
In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.

J. B. Priestley
This little steamer, like all her brave and battered sisters, is immortal. She'll go sailing proudly down the years in the epic of Dunkirk. And our great-grand-children, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.

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
It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.

J. B. Priestley
As we read the school reports on our children we realize a sense of relief that…nobody is reporting in this fashion on us!

J. B. Priestley
Living in 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
The first fall of snow is not only an event, but it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up to find yourself in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?

J. B. Priestley
But the point is, now, at this moment, or at any moment, we're only a cross-section 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
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.

J. B. Priestley
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.

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

J. B. Priestley
Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning.

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. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art.

J. B. Priestley
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
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