76 Quotes by John Osborne

(Charles) Laughton was one of the most pugnaciously morose men I had ever met. His huge talent seemed to endorse his implacable resentment. His Caliban self-portraiture must have been further agnozied by being incarcerated, like so many of his unhappy generation, in that closet which dared not speak its name. Even his large collection of Klees and Kokoshchkas was displayed as trophies of martyrdom rather than joyful plunder.

How bitter is lovelessness both to suffer and to inflict. More than anything I have dreaded the despair of its remembrance and the threat of its repeat.

Women who are encouraged to complain of 'harassment' have never felt the nasty draft that whistles round a man subjected to female scrutiny. The masculine leer at least is warmed by the breath of inquisitive lust. It may be tedious, even offensive, but it must be preferable to the rubber-glove approach of the female National Health Medical: one's brains as well as balls are up for grabs.

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.

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.

They seem to think I’m sort o juvenile delinquent, the result of an undesirable background. Give him a normal reliable theatrical home, and you’ll find he can behave as decently as anyone else.

There was no question in my mind on that muggy August day that within less than a year - and on my father's birthday - Look Back in Anger would have opened, in what still seems like an inordinately long, sharp and glimmering summer.

If one word applied to that post-war decade it was inertia. Enthusiasm there was not, in this climate of fatigue. Jimmy Porter was hurt because things had remained the same. Colonel Redfern grieved that everything had changed. They were both wrong, but that was hard to see at the time.

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.