Quotes by J. B. Priestley - Page 2 | QuoteForever

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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 / Novelist
Death
People
Prayer
Copy Quote
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 / Novelist
Good Morning
Inspiring
Life
Motivational
Moving On
Morning
Delighted
Magic
New Day
Waiting
More
Always
Try
Bit
Somewhere
Been
New
Day
Fresh
Perhaps
Prospect
Start
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Birthday
Smile
Age
Aging
Disillusioned
Perfect
Perfect Life
Spread
Life Day Living
Living
Advertisement
Life Age Day
Touch
Before
Changes
Every Day
Perpetually
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I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Done
People
Play
Copy Quote
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 / Novelist
Demand
One Day
Understanding
Copy Quote
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 / Novelist
Facts
Heart
Shy
Copy Quote
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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Delight
Fashion
Heaven
Relief
School
Rise
Nobody
Read
Realize
Reporting
Sense
Thank
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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 / Novelist
War
Britain
Burned
Democracy
Democratic
Hymns
Losing
Possessed
Years
Bombed
Immediately
Virtues
Rapidly
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Book
Reputation
Rising
Writing
Years
Fellow
Finds
Producing
They Say
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I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part - sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn't buy a better grumbling outfit.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Grumbling
Sagging
Voice
Copy Quote
A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Cold
Magic
Mind
Copy Quote
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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Discovering
Dozen
Half
Important
Important Person
Reading
Lifetimes
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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 / Novelist
Dream
Men
Destiny
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Men
Soccer
Two
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Challenges
Icy
Mood
Odds
Paper
Writing
Rules
Face
Challenge
Desk
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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 / Novelist
Calling
Faces
Feelings
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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 / Novelist
Faith
Light
Shadow
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Men
Heart
House
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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 / Novelist
Ideas
Mind
Two
Copy Quote
The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Cutting
Hair
Real
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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 / Novelist
Needs
Pressure
Race
Copy Quote
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?
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Bed
Childhood
Different
Enchantment
Fall
Found
Snow
Wake Up
World
Go
Then
Another
Quite
Only
First
Event
Magical
Wake
Where
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Bombs
Britain
Circumstances
Nuclear
Warfare
Announce
Early
Plain
Proposes
Reject
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If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Men
Believe
Museums
Copy Quote
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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Apples
Complaining
Tree
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The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours, sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them, yet cannot make plain his difference.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Men
Differences
Together
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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 / Novelist
Administrative
Colour
Fire
Order
Sound
Geniuses
Orders
Pattern
Reveal
Towering
Types
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Food
Coffee
Eye
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Good Night
Men
Blood
Fire
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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 / Novelist
Men
School
Style
Copy Quote
California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Character
Civilization
Philosophy
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Science
Civilization
Skills
Copy Quote
Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Football
Player
Soccer
Copy Quote
There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Men
Intelligent
People
Copy Quote
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 / Novelist
Food
Stars
Vintage
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Dream
Real
Self
Copy Quote
There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Science
Lonely
Typewriters
Copy Quote
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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Missing
Party
Years
Copy Quote
On the 1st of August, 1774, I endeavoured to extract air from mercurius calcinates per se [mercury oxide]; and I presently found that, by means of this lens, air was expelled from it very readily. … I admitted water to it [the extracted air], and found that it was not imbibed by it. But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame… I was utterly at a loss how to account for it.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Air
Loss
Mean
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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.
J. B. Priestley / Novelist
Children
Keys
Piano
Copy Quote

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