Quotes from James Agate

My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.

Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.