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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
Men
Idleness
Settle
Settling
Fool
Energy
Place
Nothing
Something
Fussy

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
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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.
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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.
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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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It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
J. B. Priestley
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In a matriarchy men should be encouraged to take it easy, for most women prefer live husbands to blocks of shares and seats on the board.
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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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 show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
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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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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To put failure behind you, face up to 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