Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by J. B. Priestley

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

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

Western man is schizophrenic.

Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.

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

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

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.

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

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

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.

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?

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.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.

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.

Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.

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

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.

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

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

It had the old double keyboard, an entirely different set of keys for capitals and figures, so that the paper seemed a long way off, and the machine was as big and solid as a battle cruiser. Typing was then a muscular activity. You could ache after it. If you were not familiar with those vast keyboards, your hand wandered over them like a child lost in a wood. The noise might have been that of a shipyard on the Clyde. You would no more have thought of carrying one of those grim structures as you would have thought of travelling with a piano.

To put failure behind you, face up to it.

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

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.

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.

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.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

But the point is, now, at this moment, or any moment, we're only cross-sections 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To multiply your joy, count your blessings.

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.

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.

One of the delights beyond the grasp of youth is that of Not Going. Not to have an invitation for the dance, the party, the picnic, the excursion is to be diminished. To have an invitation and then not to be able to go -- oh cursed spite! Now I do not care the rottenest fig whether I receive an invitation or not. After years of illusion, I finally decided I was missing nothing by Not Going. I no longer care whether I am missing anything or not.

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.

The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.