James Evershed Agate (September 9, 1877 – June 6, 1947) was a British diarist and critic. In the period between the wars, he was one of Britain's most influential theatre critics. After working in his father's business until his late twenties he found his way into journalism, being on the staff of The Manchester Guardian (1907–14); drama critic for The Saturday Review (1921–23), and The Sunday Times (1923–47), and holding the same post for the BBC (1925–32). Agate's diaries and letters, published in a series of nine volumes under the title of Ego, are a record of the British theatre of his era and also of his non-theatrical interests, including sports, social gossip and his private preoccupations with his health and precarious finances. In addition to drama criticism he wrote about the cinema and English literature for London newspapers, and published three novels, translated a play and had it staged in London, albeit briefly, and regularly brought out collections of his theatre essays and reviews. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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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.
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.
My mind is not a bed to be made and re-made.
New Year's Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
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.
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.
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(September 9 is also the birthday of Cardinal Richelieu, Leo Tolstoy, and Paul Goodman.)
Categories: James Agate, Quotes of the day
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