Quotes from J. B. Priestley

To love to teach is one thing, to love those you teach is another.

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

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.

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

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

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

I sometimes wish they would swagger more now, buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats, and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds, which is what, at heart - bless 'em - they are.

One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of 'not going'!

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.

The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith

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

To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.

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

California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life... its flavourless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried rooted in tradition and character.

We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.

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

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

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