James Agate Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

Don't pity me now,
Don't pity me never;
I'm going to do nothing
For ever and ever.

James Agate
I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

James Agate
Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

James Agate
New Year Resolutions
1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.
2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

James Agate
Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

James Agate
All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.

James Agate
In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael.

James Agate
I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuchsia drenched with rain.

James Agate
The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.

James Agate
A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it.

James Agate
This was an actress who, for twenty years, had the world at her feet. She kicked it away, and the ball rolled out of her reach.

James Agate
The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.

James Agate
How to reply to being sent unsolicited manuscripts:
Mr James Agate regrets that he has no time to bother about the enclosed in which he has been greatly interested.

James Agate
Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.

James Agate
What is wrong with a little incest? It is both handy and cheap.
When reviewing 'The Barretts of Wimpole Street'

James Agate
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it

James Agate
The worst of failure in this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.

James Agate
The producer. This is a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

James Agate
Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

James Agate