James Agate Quotations

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

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

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

My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

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

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. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks.

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

Intelligence: I was asked tonight why I refuse to have truck with intellectuals after business hours. But of course I won t. 1. I am not an intellectual. Two minutes talk with Aldous Huxley, William Glock, or any of the New Statesman crowd would expose me utterly. 2. I am too tired after my day's work to man the intellectual palisade. 3. When my work is finished I want to eat, drink, smoke, and relax. 4. 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. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks. My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.

New Year's resolution: To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 English instinctively admire any man who has no talent, and is modest about it.