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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
Paid
Kicks
Paper
Soccer
Watches
Ball
Shillings
Watch
Twenty
Hamlet
Two
Woods
Ink
Much
Twenties
Violin
Men
Balls
Wood
Merely
Kick
More quotes by J. B. Priestley
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
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
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.
J. B. Priestley
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
Western man is schizophrenic.
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
It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
J. B. Priestley
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
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
To put failure behind you, face up to it.
J. B. Priestley
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
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
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
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
Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.
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
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
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
I fancy that the Hell of Too Many People would occupy a respectable place in the hierarchy of infernal regions.
J. B. Priestley
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
