Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by James Agate

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British critic James Agate.

Last updated on April 15, 2025.

James Evershed Agate was an English diarist and theatre critic between the two world wars. He took up journalism in his late twenties and was on the staff of The Manchester Guardian in 1907–1914. He later became a drama critic for The Saturday Review (1921–1923), The Sunday Times (1923–1947) and the BBC (1925–1932). The nine volumes of Agate's diaries and letters cover the British theatre of his time and non-theatrical interests such as sports, social gossip and private preoccupations with health and finances. He published three novels, translated a play briefly staged in London, and regularly published collections of theatre essays and reviews.

British - Critic | September 9, 1877 - June 6, 1947

Source: Wikipedia

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

James Agate

My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

James Agate

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

James Agate

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

James Agate

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

James Agate

Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he'll 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

My mind is not a bed to be made and remade.

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

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

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

James Agate

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

James Agate

New Year's resolution: To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.

James Agate

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

James Agate

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

James Agate

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.

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

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

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

To force myself to earn more money, I determined to spend more.

James Agate

I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

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

Top 21 Quotes & Sayings by James Agate

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