Quotes by J. B. Priestley

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how theyre growing.”

“Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.”

“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.”

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

“The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?”

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless em - they are.

One of the delights known to age and beyond the grasp of youth is that of not going!

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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