Quotes from J. B. Priestley

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.

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

Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves.

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.

To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.

In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.

Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

The people who pretend that dying is rather like strolling into the next room always leave me unconvinced. Death, like birth, must be a tremendous event.

Write as often as possible, not with the idea at once of getting into print, but as if you were learning an instrument.

Western man is schizophrenic.

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

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.

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?

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

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned.

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.

As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us.

Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them.

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

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be.

Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man.

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.