Life & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley lands the insult with the neat economy of a stage punchline: critics as organisms that can only live off someone else’s labor. “Parasites” isn’t just name-calling; it’s an argument about dependency dressed up as biology. He’s implying a whole critical industry exists less to illuminate art than to feed on it, converting creation into commentary the way a scavenger converts a carcass into calories. The second clause sharpens the blade. “If nothing had been written, would find nothing to write” reduces criticism to pure reactivity, denying it any generative intelligence of its own. No art, no critics; therefore critics don’t matter.

The subtext is a defensive writer’s creed: the maker is primary, the judge is secondary, and the judge’s authority is suspicious precisely because it arrives after the fact. Priestley’s phrasing also sneaks in a class critique: critics as middlemen, professional tastemakers who can’t (or won’t) risk the vulnerability of making the thing itself. It’s a swipe at a cultural ecosystem where reputations can be made by dismissal, and where cleverness sometimes masquerades as insight.

Context matters. Priestley wrote in a Britain thick with newspaper reviews and highbrow gatekeeping, and he lived through eras when critics could tank a play on opening night or canonize a novelist by fiat. The line reads like a preemptive strike: not merely anger at bad reviews, but a bid to delegitimize the tribunal. Its potency comes from how it flatters artists while needling everyone who’s ever confused proximity to art with participation in it.