John Osborne Quotes

John Osborne presents blunt, angry commentary on anger, nation and warning that cuts straight to the bone.

24 quotes

1. Jimmy Porter: They spend their time mostly looking forward to the past.

2. George Dillon: It's easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.

3. This is a letter of hate. It is for you my countrymen, I mean those men of my country who have defiled it. The men with manic fingers leading the sightless, feeble, betrayed body of my country to its death.

4. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

5. Archie Rice: Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

6. Archie Rice: I'm dead behind these eyes. I'm dead, just like the whole inert, shoddy lot out there. It doesn't matter because I don't feel a thing, and neither do they.

7. Archie Rice: Let me know where you're working tomorrow night and I'll come and see you.

8. John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre - a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity.

9. Go on - but don't think you can kill my confidence. I've had experts doing it for years.

10. It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

11. And even in the hatred of the majority, there's a kind of triumph because I know that, although they'd never admit it, they secretly respect me.

12. Laughter's the nearest we ever get, or should get, to sainthood. It's the state of grace that saves most of us from contempt.

13. There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success.

14. Yes, I loved her. I was in love with her, whatever that may mean.

15. I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

16. Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.

17. Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only ourselves.

18. You see I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry - angry and helpless. And I can never forget it. I knew more about - love... betrayal... and death, when I was ten years old than you will probably ever know in your life.

19. We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.

20. A refined sort of butcher, a woman is.

21. The schoolteacher is certainly underpaid as a childminder, but ludicrously overpaid as an educator.

22. Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age when no man dies for love except upon the stage.

23. I must be the luckiest man in the world. Not only am I bisexual, I am also Welsh.

24. Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books same reviews.