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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.