Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself – with a smile.
There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.
It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
Nearly everything possible had been done to spoil the game: the heavy financial interest; the absurd transfer and player-selling system; the lack of any birth or residential qualifications; the absurd publicity given to every feature of it by the press; the monstrous partisanships of the crowds.
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.
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.
We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.
Many a man is praised for his reserve and so-called shyness when he is simply too proud to risk making a fool of himself.
Childhood, catching our imagination when it is fresh and tender, never lets go of us.
A loving wife will do anything for her husband except stop criticizing him and trying to improve him.
There can be no doubt that smoking nowadays is largely a miserable automatic business. People use tobacco without ever taking an intelligent interest in it. They do not experiment, compare, fit the tobacco to the occasion. A man should always be pleasantly conscious of the fact that he is smoking.
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.
I was surrounded, and often enchanted, it appeared, by nothings.
But what is this clock, marking only so many years, that such men seem to consult in the dark of their being? We do not know. All we do know for certain is that no such clock, no such warnings, can come out of the passing time that we are told is all we have. They belong to a larger idea of Time, like all these dreams that came true.
When we are older we are able to live in – and make the best of – one continuing world, but when we are young we feel sometimes that in an unknown and sinister fashion the whole cosmos has been changed, one age ended and another begun when we were not noticing what was happening.
Although it was over 50 years ago, I have not forgotten the moment when, after exploring the maze of Indian metaphysics, I reached its central Thought. I read that if we go deeper and deeper into the self we can arrive at last at the recognition of Atman, the essential self; and that if we go deeper into the not-self, the world that seems so solid and real, pulling aside veil after veil of illusion, we shall find Brahman, the ultimate reality; and that Atman and Brahman are identical.
Time must be tracked down in the inner world... It is one of the peculiarities of Time that it is intensely private and yet also widely shared.
The happiest types I’ve ever known ran puppet shows – turning puppets into people. It works much better than turning people into puppets.
Public men, Mr Birling, have responsibilities as well as privileges.
What appears to be definite and precise does not belong to any acceptable reality. It is only the experiences, the queer previsions, the fleeting premonitions, that are real. Vague and insubstantial though they may appear to be, compared with anything else in the mists and shifting lights of Time theory, they loom up like mountains of iron ore.
I don’t dislike life the way you seem to do. But then you may be a fish out of water. I’m not. I’m where I want to be, doing what I want to do. But even so, there’s nothing wonderful about it. Most of the time it’s like – let’s say – living with a lion. One day you can make it jump through hoops, or even ride on its back. But get careless, make a wrong move, and it’ll have you in a corner and be tearing an arm off.