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Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
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
Perhaps
Writer
Write
Better
Must
Writing
Would
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.
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
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
Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J. B. Priestley
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
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
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
I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.
J. B. Priestley
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
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
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
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 resent and remember brings strife to forgive and forget brings peace.
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
What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!
J. B. Priestley
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