Best 18 quotes of James Agate on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.