Related Quotes

J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

In plain words; now that Britain has told the world 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. This is not pacifism. There is no suggestion here of abandoning the immediate defence of this island...No, what should be abandoned is the idea of deterrence-by-threat-of-retaliation. There is no real security in it, no decency in it, no faith, hope, nor charity in it.

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J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

I'm in the business of providing people with secondary satisfactions. It wouldn't have done me much good if they had all written their own plays, would it?

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

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

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Italian Proverbs

You are more likely to win if you take the initiative and make an attack rather than preparing to defend yourself.

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

A synopsis is a cold thing. You do it with the front of your mind. If you're going to stay with it, you never get quite the same magic as when you're going all out.

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

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.

Experience | Speculation | World |

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in color 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.

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness - when a glorious idea comes to mind and, secondly, when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be.

Experience | Fear | Illusion | World |

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Italian Proverbs

Women are wise impromptu, fools on reflection.

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J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

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.

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J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

I have not been nourished by English Literature... for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer... I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright color, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact ?mad?. . . but I don?t believe I am... I set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.

Light |

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J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

I will not give you counsel, saying do this, or do that. For not in doing or contriving, nor in choosing between this course and another, can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be.

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