Top 15 J. B. Priestley Quotes

So Tom was left alone again, this time for quite a spell. The place had filled up now and he was gradually pushed back from the bar counter until he found himself closely ringed round by men and girls, nearly all talking hard. They were wildly different in appearance, ranging from the slovenly to the excessively smart, but they were all alike, it seemed to him as he listened to them, in being on the edge of things. They were nearly doing a television series, almost about to have a play done at the Arts, just missing a commission to photograph Sicily for a coffee-table book, possibly writing two songs for a new musical, being asked to try again for that super modelling job. And while they might be all on their way towards ultimate disillusion and misery, just now they were gay and excited, full of enthusiasm for themselves, their work, their enchanting style of life. Tom had met a few men and women of great and widely-recognised talent, large personalities a long way from these edges, people bang in the centre, and they had displayed little or none of this enthusiasm, often seeming dubious, disenchanted, melancholy, weighed down by the sense of responsibility a great talent and reputation bring. But these types, with fuzzy little talents at best and with only the faintest glimmer of reputation, were still enchanted - at least at this hour with drinks in their hands. And not for the first time, Tom wondered about the drinks, which demanded a constant passing of pound notes. Nobody he had overheard so far appeared to have earned any money recently, yet here they were buying double gins and whiskies.

I am not an atheist, but I cannot agree with men who talk about God as if He had once attended a Speech Day at their theological college.

Because most children are highly imaginative, it is supposed by some that to reach maturity we ought to leave imagination behind, like the habit of smearing our faces with jam or chocolate. But an adult in whom imagination has withered is mentally lame and lopsided, in danger of turning into a zombie or a murderer. It is the creative imagination that has given our ruthless bloodthirsty species its occasional gleams of nobility, its hope of rising above the muck it spreads.

[A] man must be either conscientiously scientific in his approach or frankly speculative. What he must not do is present his speculative untested ideas in a manner and style of dogmatic certainty that they are not entitled to claim. This is being pseudo-scientific.

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 our secret depths, wherever we do our unspoken wishing, either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.
On this level, below that of philosophies and rational opinions, either we reject or ignore the unknown, the apparently inexplicable, the marvellous and miraculous, or we welcome every sign of them. At one extreme is a narrow intolerant bigotry, snarling at anything outside the accepted world-picture, and at the other is an idiotic credulity, the prey of any glib charlatan. At one end the world becomes a prison, at the other a madhouse.

It is, of course, men who are more likely to inhibit themselves for the sake of appearing to be sensible and dependable.[…] If pressed, I will agree that more women than men wish to appear wonderfully sensitive and intuitive, and may stop being realistic […] in order to deceive themselves and other people. On the other hand, women in general tend to be more realistic and yet in certain matters more open-minded than men, more ready to resist that pressure of opinion. They are less likely to be put into blinkers by ideas.
Moreover […] as a rule the average woman notices far more than the average man; she has a better eye for detail than he has; she makes a more alert witness.

[I]f self-deception has to be risked anyhow, it might be better to risk it to take a broad view than a narrow view. It may be foolish, perhaps even dangerous, to wander too far from the highway and then be the dupe of fantasies; but it may be even more foolish, even more dangerous in the end, to be so determined to keep to the well-tested road that you wear blinkers, see nothing of the surrounding landscape, and find the road itself, all that you can see, more and more wearisome and detestable.

The very newspapers that celebrate the latest conquest in their largest print also keep asking us what is the matter with Woman nowadays, when she has so much she never had before. The answer is that she is tired of having to live with neurotic, immature conquerors.

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.

I have pointed out already how ideas seep down to wider and commoner levels of intelligence and feeling until at last they are believed to be solid realities. It is precisely the 'hard-headed and realistic' who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses. They serve prison sentences behind walls and doors they only imagine are there.

We tend quite rightly to associate an age with its newest and most original ideas, and there is no harm in this as long as we remember that only a few men, at that time, may have actually held those ideas, and that many decades, often amounting to centuries, may pass before those ideas have seeped down to wider and commoner levels of belief, thought, and feeling. So many 'hard-headed and realistic' men of today repeat what scientists were saying 100 years ago, and may know nothing about the outlook and prevailing moods of scientists today. And men in the street now assert beliefs originally found among the intellectuals of the 18th century. We may expect time-lags of various lengths.

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.

Fully to appreciate a play we have to maintain a delicate balance between what is taking place apparently on two different levels of the mind. On one level we are involved in the drama, are living imaginatively with its characters. On the other level we are enjoying a performance by actors on a stage, being fully aware that we are in a theatre.

I […] thoroughly detest [novels that] fasten on to some historical figure, offering me bogus biography, an unpleasant mixture of fact and fiction.