John Osborne Quotes

“I was hurt by their lack of trust in my stability. Perhaps they were right? But I also believed they were wrong, narrow and snobbish. They had confused lightness of heart with frivolity. I was not downcast or aggrieved. Rather to my surprise I was excited.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“I must be the only playwright this century to have been pursued up a London street by an angry mob. LIke most battle experiences, my own view was limited by my vantage point at the back of the stalls. There was an inescapable tension in the house. The theatre itself took on a feeling of rococo mockery and devilment, too hot, a snake-pit of stabbing jewellery, hair-pieces, hobbling high heels, stifling wraps and unmanageable long frocks.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“...I remembered Binkie throwing a few chips of encouragement to me as he said, with a gleam of disaffection, 'Of course, Noel's quite uneducated.' Whether it implied that the Master was as unashamedly ignorant as myself, expelled and barely literate at fifteen, condemned to a fixed condition of 'not being ready for it yet', I hadn't resolved. It merely seemed a piece of clumsy treachery, a fair example of the reverence for academic skill and a classic misapprehension of its link with creative imagination. Even Binkie, from his own more distinguished production, could have deduced that from Shakespeare to Shaw a little Latin and less Greek, or none of either, did no damage to untutored dramatists.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Jocelyn told me that she had never seen me so out of control of my life. Even the recent record of my mishandling of events with Mary and Francine might have alerted her to the fact that I often confronted problems like an improvising chimpanzee faced with the dashboard of a jumbo jet. What she did not grasp was that old muddle-minded Johnny was trying, above all else, in a spirit of life-long caprice, to re-establish his own authority and get his simian claws on the levers.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Most playwrights should observe the same constitutional rights as the Queen: to be consulted, to advise and to warn.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“She was immovable and denied, in teh face of the week's passing, that a two-and-a-half-day job had become a seven-day obsession. She was the grotesque adult embodiment of that properly despised schoolboy creature of fretful, incontinent ambition, a swot.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Penelope shared the public's illusion that writing is something that you sit down and do at prescribed sittings, and not that it is something that must be lived daily amid preoccuptions that have nothing to do putting together sentences - ordinary activities like cooking, going to the races, walking the dogs, seeing a bad movie and not writing about it, reading only for pleasure, going to pubs, the seaside, church. Not for her: embassy supper was obligatory, the church fete a tiresome frivolity.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“The striving fluency of the Hampstead nanny's boy is deceptive and occasionally plausible. With its cultural allusions and cross-references to other disciplines, it is the gab-gift of someone to whom English is an adoptive tongue. Intellect does terrible things to the mind.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise