We cannot get grace from gadgets.... - J.B. Priestley - Quotes.Pub

We cannot get grace from gadgets.

J.B. Priestley Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer’s race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot.

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?

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.

Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds.

In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.

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.

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

Western man is schizophrenic.

In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.

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.

Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.

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.

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

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

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.

In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare.

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.

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

To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.

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

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.

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