J.B. Priestley - biography

“Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.”

“The greatest writers of this age...  are aware of the mystery of our existence.”

“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.”

“Accidents, try to change them - it’s impossible.  The accidental reveals man.”

“The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.”

“If we openly declare what is wrong with us, what is our deepest need, then perhaps the death and despair will by degrees disappear.”

“Our trouble is that we drink too much tea.  I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.”

“Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they’re growing.”

“If you are a genius, you’ll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write.”

“There are plenty of clever young writers.  But there is too much genius, not enough talent.”

“To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own - this is happiness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticising and trying to improve him.”

“Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.”

“Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.”

“There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.”

“When I was young there was no respect for the young, and now that I am old there is no respect for the old.  I missed out coming and going.”

“Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.”

“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.”

“Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.”

“We pay when old for the excesses of youth.”

“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.”

“I know only two words of American slang, ‘swell’ and ‘lousy’.  I think ‘swell’ is lousy, but ‘lousy’ is swell.”

“In plain words: now that Britain has told the world that she has the H-Bomb she should announce as early as possible that she has done with it, that she proposes to reject in all circumstances nuclear warfare.”

“Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.”

“She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.”

“The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event.  You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?”

“The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”

“To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.”

“Western man is schizophrenic.”

J.B. Priestley contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
The Old Dark House (1932)
The Good Companions (1933)
Sing As We Go (1934)
Look Up and Laugh (1935)
Laburnum Grove (1936)
We Live in Two Worlds (1937)
Jamaica Inn (1939)
Let the People Sing (1942)
The Foreman Went to France (1942)
They Came to a City (1945)
Last Holiday (1950)
An Inspector Calls (1954)
The Good Companions (1957)
The Old Dark House (1963)
A Severed Head (1970)
Vacances sur ordonnance (2006)