J. B. Priestley

Writer

1894-09-13

Quotes by J. B. Priestley

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

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• We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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?

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

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• One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of not going.

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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.

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• California, that advance post of our civilisation, 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.

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• To show a child what has once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own, so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection, this is happiness.

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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.

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• To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.

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

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• 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.

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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.

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• Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

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