J. B. Priestley Quotes

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

  J. B. Priestley

• Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness—when a glorious idea comes to mind, and when a last page has been written and you haven’t had time to know how much better it ought to be.

  J. B. Priestley

• The way to write a book is the application of the seat of one’s pants to the seat of one’s chair.

  J. B. Priestley

• We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.

  J. B. Priestley

• We must beware the revenge of the starved senses, the embittered animal in its prison.

  J. B. Priestley

• Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.

  J. B. Priestley

• A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you’re going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you’re going all out.

  J. B. Priestley

• We plan, we toil, we suffer in the hope of what? A camel-load of idol’s eyes? The title deeds of Radio City? The empire of Asia? A trip to the moon? No, no, no, no. Simply to wake just in time to smell coffee and bacon and eggs.

  J. B. Priestley

• God can stand being told by Professor Ayer and Marghanita Laski that He doesn’t exist.

  J. B. Priestley

• Our great-grandchildren, when they learn how we began this war by snatching glory out of defeat . . . may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious.

  J. B. Priestley

• I’m in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn’t have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?

  J. B. Priestley

• If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it’s to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

  J. B. Priestley

• They will review a book by a writer much older than themselves as if it were an over-ambitious essay by a second-year student . . . It is the little dons I complain about, like so many corgis trotting up, hoping to nip your ankles.

  J. B. Priestley

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

  J. B. Priestley

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

  J. B. Priestley

• 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.

  J. B. Priestley

• 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.

  J. B. Priestley

• Western man is schizophrenic.

  J. B. Priestley

• 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.

  J. B. Priestley

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

  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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