J. B. Priestley
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"John Boynton Priestley", Order of Merit/OM, known as "J. B. Priestley", was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster.

His Yorkshire background is reflected in much of his fiction, notably in The Good Companions (1929), which first brought him to wide public notice. Many of his plays are structured around a Time slip/time-slip, and he went on to develop a new theory of time, with different dimensions that link past, present and future.

In 1940, he broadcast a series of short propaganda talks that were credited with saving civilian morale during the Battle of Britain. His left-wing beliefs brought him into conflict with the government, but influenced the birth of the Welfare State.

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Our dourest parsons, who followed the nonconformist fashion of long extemporary prayers, always seemed to me to be bent on bullying God.

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Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them.

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The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?

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Comedy, we may say, is society protecting itself - with a smile.

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Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

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Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats.

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I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

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A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.

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If there was a little room somewhere in the British Museum that contained only about twenty exhibits and good lighting, easy chairs, and a notice imploring you to smoke, I believe I should become a museum man.

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