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

— J. B. Priestley

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.

— J. B. Priestley

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.

— J. B. Priestley

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

— J. B. Priestley

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.

— J. B. Priestley

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.

— J. B. Priestley

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.

— J. B. Priestley

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.

— J. B. Priestley

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

— J. B. Priestley

The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbors sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them yet cannot make plain his difference.

— J. B. Priestley