James Agate Quotes

New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.

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.

Long experience has taught me that in England nobody goes to the theatre unless he or she has bronchitis.

I don't know very much but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it…My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

In her early days she had that beatific expression characteristic of Victorian prettiness - like a sheep painted by Raphael.

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.

Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

To force myself to earn more money, I determined to spend more.

Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.

Don't pity me now, don't pity me never; I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.

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.

The Englishman can get along with sex quite perfectly so long as he can pretend that it isn't sex but something else.

I... wonder what it is in the New York air that enables me to sit up till all hours of the night in an atmosphere which in London would make a horse dizzy, but here merely clears the brain.

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.

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.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

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.

The worst of failure of this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.

My mind is not a bed to be made and remade.