J. B. Priestley Quotes

52 Sourced 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.

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 more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

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 to do in half a dozen lifetimes.

J. B. Priestley
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
Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself—with a smile.

J. B. Priestley
Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators.

J. B. Priestley
God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He doesn't exist.

J. B. Priestley
I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces.

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
Here was a society dominated entirely by the masculine principle.

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

J. B. Priestley
On being awarded the Order of Merit:
I've only two things to say about it. First I deserve it. Second, they've been too long about giving me it. There'll be another vacancy very soon.

J. B. Priestley
The weakness of American civilization, and perhaps the chief reason why it creates so much discontent, is that it is so curiously abstract. It is a bloodless extrapolation of a satisfying life…You dine off the advertiser's 'sizzling' and not the meat of the steak.

J. B. Priestley
Men are much better than their ordinary life allows them to be.

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
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
Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken — every tick of the clock — making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.

J. B. Priestley
Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

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
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
It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

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

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
We cannot get grace from gadgets. The dishes in the bakelite houses of the future may not break, but the heart can. A man may be as unhappy in the spun glass trousers of tomorrow as he is today in worsted ones.

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

J. B. Priestley
Anyone who is under the impression that the world is becoming too crowded should move to Nevada.

J. B. Priestley