J. B. Priestley Quotes

Cathedral cities, market towns, ports forgotten by the sea, spas long out of fashion, all these can decay beautifully, and often their charm increases as the life ebbs out of them. Industrial towns, like steam-engines, are only even tolerable if they are in working order and puffing away.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

Remember what we once were and what we thought we'd be. And now this. And it's all we have, Allan, it's us. Every step we've taken -- every tick of the clock -- making everything worse. If this is all life is, what's the use? Better to die, like carol, before you find it out, before Time gets to work on you. I've felt it before, Allan, but never as I've done tonight. There's a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.

Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators.

In the same way, the dramatist has a double task, creating the imaginary life of his characters and at the same time writing for a certain number of players on a certain kind of stage. It is this mixture of sheer creation and a highly skilled technique that makes playwriting difficult. Even in plays considered worth a production, nine times out of 10 there is an obvious deficiency on one side or the other.

Conquest is all. having conquered land and sea, we are now conquering space, more and more of it. As soon as we have conquered the moon, we must make plans to conquer the planets. I am not denying that there is in all this a fine mixed element of enterprise, ingenuity and adventure. But the repeated use of these terms conquer and conquest is worth noting. It offers us a picture of modern humanity as a restless and ruthless immature male. He is restless and ruthless because the relation between the conqueror and the conquered is rarely satisfying. The conqueror has to push on because he soon finds his victories hollow and disappointing. Nature, nothing if not feminine, seems to take a sly pleasure in outwitting her conquerors.

[P]ursuing Time, we are like a knight on a quest, condemned to wander through innumerable forests, bewildered and baffled, because the magic beast he is looking for is the horse he is riding.

No matter what is willed by consciousness, that which belongs to the depths can only be restored in the depths: the numinous lies outside the power of collectives, cannot be subject to state decree, created by a resolution at an international conference, offered to all shareholders and employees by the board of Standard Oil or General Motors.

Science can function only by abstracting from the reality in which the scientist has his being. In spite of the astonishing complications it discovers, with which it dazzles and almost blinds us, science is compelled by its own terms of reference to be a drastic simplification.

In this place, whether we call it Bruddersford or Pittford Falls, perfection is not to be found, neither in men nor in the lot they are offered, to say nothing of the tales we tell of them, these hints and guesses, words in the air and gesticulating shadows, these stumbling chronicles of a dream of life.

He was quite capable of talking just as men talk in bad stories in popular magazines, and Miss Matfield had sometimes wondered whether it was because he had read a great many bad stories or because the stories were nearer the truth than one thought and were worked up, on the fringes of Empire, out of men like Major Ansdell.

Although we talk so much about coincidence we do not really believe in it. In our heart of hearts we think better of the universe, we are secretly convinced that it is not such a slipshod, haphazard affair, that everything in it has meaning.

We English certainly do not like working for work's sake. There is nothing inside us that cries to be set going at an early hour and kept at it until a late hour. We have no private passion for being industrious.

But then we assume on our paper that nobody thinks. Which is all right. But where we're wrong—and of course I'm not really including myself but mean the top boys—is in thinking that our readers, dumb as they are, take us seriously.