Great Throughts Treasury

"Women are wise impromptu, fools on reflection." - Italian Proverbs

"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." - 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." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile." - 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?" - 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." - 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." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above the seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep." - 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." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien