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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
Two
Think
Thinking
Slang
Swell
Lousy
American
Words
More quotes by J. B. Priestley
If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.
J. B. Priestley
Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.
J. B. Priestley
Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
J. B. Priestley
I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.
J. B. Priestley
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
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
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
J. B. Priestley
To put failure behind you, face up to it.
J. B. Priestley
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J. B. Priestley
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
J. B. Priestley
In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
J. B. Priestley
The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.
J. B. Priestley
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.
J. B. Priestley
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.
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
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.
J. B. Priestley
I have always been a grumbler. I am designed for the part - sagging face, weighty underlip, rumbling, resonant voice. Money couldn't buy a better grumbling outfit.
J. B. Priestley
To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
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
Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
J. B. Priestley
