Shaw’s plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces.
New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
Don’t pity me now, don’t pity me never; I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.
Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn’t there. If, however, you force him to look into it, he’ll at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.
All I want is a modest place in Mr X’s Good Reading, Miss Y’s Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose.
Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.
To force myself to earn more money, I determined to spend more.
Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.
My mind is not a bed to be made and remade.
The worst of failure of this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.
The maddest phenomenon in this wholly mad world – that the filming or wirelessing of an event, whether it is the Grand National or an attack in force on the Maginot Line, is held to be of more importance than the event itself.
This was an actress who, for twenty years, had the world at her feet. She kicked it away, and the ball rolled out of her reach.
In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness – like a sheep painted by Raphael.
A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn’t feel like it. An amateur is a man who can’t do his job when he does feel like it.
The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
New Year’s resolution: To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.