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

J. B. Priestley

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J. B. Priestley
Age: 89 †
Born: 1894
Born: September 13
Died: 1984
Died: August 14
Journalist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Bradford
Yorkshire
John Boynton Priestley
J Priestley
Thinking
Slang
Swell
Lousy
American
Words
Two
Think

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To resent and remember brings strife to forgive and forget brings peace.
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It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
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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.
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Western man is schizophrenic.
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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.
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.
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To put failure behind you, face up to it.
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A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
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We cannot get grace from gadgets. In the Bakelite house of the future, the dishes may not break, but the heart can. Even a man with ten shower baths may find life flat, stale and unprofitable.
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In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.
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What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!
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Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
J. B. Priestley
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No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith
J. B. Priestley
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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.
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.
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The real lost souls don't wear their hair long and play guitars. They have crew cuts and trained minds, sign on for research in biological warfare, and don't give their parents a moment's worry.
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.
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Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.
J. B. Priestley