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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

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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
Death
Openly
Need
Declare
Needs
Deepest
Disappear
Despair
Degrees
Perhaps
Wrong

More quotes by J. B. Priestley

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One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
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Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
J. B. Priestley
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What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!
J. B. Priestley
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Western man is schizophrenic.
J. B. Priestley
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Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
J. B. Priestley
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Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
J. B. Priestley
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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
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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 fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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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
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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
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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.
J. B. Priestley
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Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.
J. B. Priestley
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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.
J. B. Priestley