Words matter. These are the best J. B. Priestley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own – this is happiness.
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
We pay when old for the excesses of youth.
The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.
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.
Western man is schizophrenic.
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.
The greatest writers of this age… are aware of the mystery of our existence.
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.
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.
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
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.
Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.
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.
I know only two words of American slang, ‘swell’ and ‘lousy’. I think ‘swell’ is lousy, but ‘lousy’ is swell.
Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile.
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.
Accidents, try to change them – it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.
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.
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.
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.
