James Agate

James Evershed Agate (9 September 1877 – 6 June 1947) was an English drama critic and diarist. He is now best remembered for his diaries, published in many volumes under the overall title Ego.

Quotes

• Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.
  • Ego (1935), p. 247, October 14, 1932.

• Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces.
  • Ego, p. 276, March 10, 1933.

• A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it.
  • Ego, p. 303, September 17, 1933.

• Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.
  • Ego 4 (1940), p. 139, November 13, 1939.

• 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.
  • Ego 4, p. 149, December 18, 1939.

• 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.
  • Ego 6 (1944), p. 189, June 9, 1943.

• The producer. This is a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.
  • Ego 6, p. 199, June 26, 1943.

• The worst of failure in this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.
  • Ego 7 (1945), p. 153, July 21, 1944.
  • On von Stauffenberg's bomb plot.

• I like listening to it just as I like looking at a fuchsia drenched with rain.
  • Ego 8 (1947), p. 255, November 25, 1945
  • Of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony.