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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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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
Settle
Settling
Fool
Energy
Place
Nothing
Something
Fussy
Men
Idleness
More quotes by 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
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
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
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
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
Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.
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
It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
J. B. Priestley
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
J. B. Priestley
To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.
J. B. Priestley
One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
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
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
To put failure behind you, face up to it.
J. B. Priestley
To resent and remember brings strife to forgive and forget brings peace.
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
Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
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
Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.
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
