John Boynton Priestley, OM (/ˈpriːstli/; 13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984), known by his pen name J.B. Priestley, was an English novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, social commentator and broadcaster.
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.
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.
Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.
It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
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.
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.
If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.
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.
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.
A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.
There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.
To resent and remember brings strife; to forgive and forget brings peace.
Man, the creature who knows he must die, who has dreams larger than his destiny, who is forever working a confidence trick on himself, needs an ally. Mine has been tobacco.
In a world shaped and colored more and more by politicians, the nations meet politically, and hardly any other way to settle their differences.
The point is to be good-to be sensitive and sincere.
To make the most of Christmas, focus on Christ.
Western man is schizophrenic.
Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.