J. B. Priestley Quotes

• England is not ruined because sinewy brown men from a distant colony sometimes hit a ball further and oftener than our men do.

  J. B. Priestley

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• It is hard to tell where the mcc ends and the Church of England begins.

  J. B. Priestley

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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

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• He was a black Irish type, with centuries of rebelliousness behind him, and I decided to chance it.

  J. B. Priestley

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• Finnegans Wake took him seventeen years to write, a length of time that suggests an elaborate hobby rather than a passionate desire to create something.

  J. B. Priestley

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

  J. B. Priestley

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• The earth is nobler than the world we have put upon it.

  J. B. Priestley

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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. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art.

  J. B. Priestley

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• We are much beholden to Machiavel and then it ought to be done. That if something has been invented, then we must use it. We don’t stop to thing of the possible consequences of its use.

  J. B. Priestley

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• Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning.

  J. B. Priestley

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• We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

  J. B. Priestley

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• Already we Viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

  J. B. Priestley

• Something in me resists the calendar expectation of happiness. Merry Christmas yourself! it mutters as it shapes a ghostly grin.

  J. B. Priestley

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

  J. B. Priestley

• 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

• A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.

  J. B. Priestley

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  J. B. Priestley

J. B. Priestley (64)

Birth:	13th September, 1894
Death:	14th August, 1984
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Playwright, Screenwriter

About

John Boynton Priestley was born in Manningham, Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. He was an English novelist, playwright and screenwriter. He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He wrote several novels include: Benighted, The Good Companions(won-James Tait Black Memorial Prize), Angel Pavement, Let the People Sing, Bright Day, Jenny Villiers, and The Magicians. He wrote several plays include: Dangerous Corner, Laburnum Grove, Eden End, Time and the Conways, I Have Been Here Before, When We Are Married, Johnson Over Jordan, and An Inspector Calls. He wrote several films include: The Old Dark House, Jamaica Inn, They Came to a City, The Foreman Went to France, Last Holiday, Look Up and Laugh, and Britain at Bay. The University of Bradford awarded Priestley the title of honorary Doctor of Letters in 1970, and he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Bradford in 1973.

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