18 J. B. Priestley Quotes

J. B. Priestley quotes

1. Living in age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

2. Our great-grand-children, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat, and then swept on to victory, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.

3. 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.

4. It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.

5. 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.

6. Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

1. 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.

2. To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.

3. 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.

4. To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.

5. 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?

6. I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.

7. It is good fiction, so largely ignored now, that brings us so much closer to the real facts.

8. 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.

9. Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.

10. What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!

11. 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.

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