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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.

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
Watch
Twenty
Hamlet
Two
Woods
Ink
Much
Twenties
Violin
Men
Balls
Wood
Merely
Kick
Paid
Kicks
Paper
Soccer
Watches
Ball
Shillings

More quotes by J. B. Priestley

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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
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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.
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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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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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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
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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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To put failure behind you, face up to it.
J. B. Priestley
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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
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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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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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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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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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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.
J. B. Priestley
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To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.
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.
J. B. Priestley
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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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Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.
J. B. Priestley
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To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.
J. B. Priestley
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To resent and remember brings strife to forgive and forget brings peace.
J. B. Priestley
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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