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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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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
Upon
Accepted
Boyhood
School
Careful
Appalling
Much
English
Masks
Men
Speech
Styles
Behinds
Conceit
Behind
Imposed
Style
Modesty
Impregnable
Public
Mask
Understatement

More quotes by J. B. Priestley

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Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
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Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
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Western man is schizophrenic.
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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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What a grand, higgledy-piggledy, sensible old place Norwich is!
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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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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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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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
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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
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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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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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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
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It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
J. B. Priestley
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To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.
J. B. Priestley
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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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Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
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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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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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