J. B. Priestley

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

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

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

We pay when old for the excesses of youth.

Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned. The perfect life is spread before us every day, but it changes and withers at a touch.

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

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.

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

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

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.

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.

Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down to do nothing.

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.

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

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.