John Osborne Quotes

Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs." [Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]

You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?

Jimmy: The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!

That voice that cries out doesn't have to be a weakling's does it?

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.

Jimmy: (in a low, resigned voice) They all want to scape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all, from love. (...) It's no good to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands.

A refined sort of butcher, a woman is.

If you’ve no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.

I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. ...There aren't any good, brave causes left. (Jimmy Porter)

Jimmy: I hope you won't make the mistake of thinking for one moment that I am a gentleman.

How I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm- that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! I'm alive! I've an idea. Why don't we have a little game? Let's pretend that we're human beings, and that we're actually alive. Just for a while. What do you say? Let's pretend we're human.” ― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

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.

Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity. For twelve months, I watched my father dying - when I was ten years old.

Jimmy: One day, when I'm no longer spending my days running a sweet-stall, I may write a book about us all. It's all here. (slapping his forehead) Written in flames a mile high. And it won't be recollected in tranquillity either, picking daffodils with Auntie Wordsworth. It'll be recollected in fire, and blood. My blood.

Alison: I don't think I want anything more to do with love. Any more. I can't take it on. Cliff: You're too young to start giving up. Too young, and too lovely.

It's no good fooling about with love you know. You can't fall into it like a soft job without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. If you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, tidy soul, you better give up the whole idea of life and become a saint, because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world... or the next.

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

I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age - unless you're an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.

Through my questions, you will learn to teach yourselves.

The trouble with entering the upper echelon is you have to work harder to stay there.

Am impresia că toată viaţa mi-o petrec luându-mi rămas bun.

I may be a lost cause, but I thought if you loved me, it needn't matter.

John Osborne laughed. “It’s not the end of the world at all,” he said. “It’s only the end of us. The world will go on just the same, only we shan’t be in it. I dare say it will get along all right without us.

Jimmy : The injustice of it is almost perfect! The wrong people going hungry, the wrong people being loved, the wrong people dying!

To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.

Jimmy: You'll end up like one of those chocolate merengues my wife is so fond of [Alison starts banging jars]...sweet and sticky on the outside, and sink your teeth in it [savouring every word]-inside, all white, messy and disgusting. [offering teapot sweetly to Helena] Milk?

Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm. Just another Sunday evening.

There is no real communication with those we love most

It is better to be a has-been than a never-was

I love this snarky line about critics. It comes from the English playwright John Osborne: "Asking a working writer how he feels about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs.

You are out of your comfort zone: Growth requires risk. Ronald E. Osborne stated, “Unless you do something beyond what you’ve already mastered, you will never grow.

Jimmy (to Allison):We'll be together in our bear's cave, and our squirrel's drey, and we'll live on honey, and nuts-lots and lots of nuts. And we'll sing songs about ourselves-about warm trees and snug caves, and lying in the sun. And you'll keep those big eyes on my fur, and help me keep my claws in order, because I'm a bit of a soppy, scruffy sort of a bear. And I'll see that you keep that sleek, bushy tail glistening as it should, because you're a very beautiful squirre, but you're none too bright either, so we've got to be careful. There are cruel steel traps lying about everywhere, just waiting for rather mad, slightly satanic, and very timid little animals.

Today the earth speaks with resonance and clearness and every ear in every civilized country of the world is attuned to its wonderful message of the creative evolution of man, except the ear of William Jennings Bryan; he alone remains stone-deaf, he alone by his own resounding voice drowns the eternal speech of nature.

(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.

Jimmy: They all want to escape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all,love. It's no good trying to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands.It takes muscle and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul- you'd better give up the whok idea of life, and because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world or the next.

The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as 'the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.' In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms. The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile.

Alison's mummy and I took one look at each other, and from then on the age of chivalry was dead.

...empty things for empty men.

Chi non ha un mondo suo si diverte a rimpiangere il tramonto di un mondo altrui.

The words of Isaiah 35:5–6 also point to a prophetic perspective of a new creation that reveals the transformation of a fallen, post–Genesis 3 world. Jesus’s miracles were not simply “spiritual healings.” He miraculously altered the material world in real time and space. Blind eyes received sight, lame hands were transformed, and the dead were raised. The blessings of the kingdom of God were a reversal of the brokenness of human sin, frailty, and even mortality. Jesus’s kingdom ministry was no less than a holistic transformation of reality into a new creation. His ministry met people who were broken both spiritually and physically and brought spiritual transformation and physical healing. Jesus then concludes his comments to John’s followers stating the blessed happiness experienced by those who respond rightly in identifying him as the “one who is to come.

you live in me, and my words live in you, ask what you will, and it shall be done to you (John 15:7).

John E. Osborne, a member of Sisco Lodge 259 in Westport, New York, was Wyoming's third governor and the first Democrat to occupy that office.  After a mob lynched the notorious outlaw George "Big Nose" Parrott in 1881, Brother Osborne, also a physician, took possession of the body to perform an autopsy.  Completing that, Brother Osborne sent Parrott's skin to a tannery, where it was made into a pair of shoes.  Subsequently, in 1883, having been elected governor, Osborne wore those shoes to his inaugural ball.

Kelvinist and Calvinist, schoolgirlishly light-hearted, she stood out in Manhattan like a Welsh miner at a bar mitzvah.

The bit was in my mouth. At last, for the first time since sleeping in crab-infested blankets in the dressing-room at Hayling Island, living on evaporated milk and biscuits, swanking about as a peroxided Hamlet, to an audience of geriatric holiday-makers, I had contrived some sort of personal control over the whole brash enterprise. I would only have myself to blame. The release from benign paternalism was firingly enjoyable.

Her dismissive skill was subtle and brutal, sometimes no more than a thin smile, a watery upward look or an amused intake of breath, a scanning cauterizing instrument which rendered any endeavor puny or extravagantly indulgent . Her son was her prize victim.

She must have achieved almost exactly what she wanted: a nice Early Night, a nice Early Life. It was certainly easy, easy and empty of spirit. She personified the terrible sin of sloth at its most paltry. Not the sloth of despair in the face of God. Despair would be like staying up spiritually too late.

[my father] usually concealed his rages with unconvincing politeness to contain his sparse energy, an instinct I may have inherited

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.

Villainy had a sense of wicked superiority about it and they had a sneaking feeling that sometimes old Robin was a bit too good to be true. Perhaps I already had a vague sense that courting and, what's more, achieving popularity was not a gift I possessed

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.

Most playwrights should observe the same constitutional rights as the Queen: to be consulted, to advise and to warn.

The inner heart of the movement was cynical, sophisticated and rigidly political. The simple, idealistic, apocalyptic visions it aroused among the mass of good-hearted adherents were ruthlessly engineered and exploited by professionals who were dedicated, born enemies of their own country. They sued all their fanaticism and skill at arousing panic and dissatisfaction among the ranks of decent, respectable, dim liberals who were genuinely dismayed and alarmed by the way the world seemed to be heading for hideous destruction.

In truth, there was no systematic policy except that which engaged the various personalities that grew around the original nucleus assembled by George Devine and Tony Richardson. Most of these were, in the mild climate of the time, left of centre, though they would now be regarded as soft-meringue-liberals by the drowsy commissars who have long since taken over.

The gratitude of playwrights for actors is almost as rare as the reverse. Golden eggs have little time for the mucky feathers that cling to them.

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.

Major depression also appears to have become unusually widespread in the late Renaissance. This disorder is diagnosed when a person shows a severely depressed mood, a loss of interest and motivation, and withdraws from usual activities. In Elizabethan Malady, Lawrence Babb analyzes references to melancholy in diverse literary works, finding that while they are almost nonexistent in the early Renaissance, by the 1600s they are a principal theme in prose, drama, and biography. Babb concludes that the late Renaissance was characterized by “an epidemic of melancholy.” The poet John Donne, who offered sonnets to the “Holy Sadness of the Soul,” provided a vivid description of this malady, which he himself knew well: “God has seen fit to give us the dregs of misery, an extraordinary sadness, a predominant melancholy, a faintness of heart, a cheerlessness, a joylessness of spirit.

I would always need a northern bite in my blood if I were to survive the writer's recurrent ailment: exhaustion. A jumbo Judy Garland at five in the morning would not ultimately nourish me as much as a plate of jellied eels in Margate. I felt a stabbing wave of homesickness.

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.

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.

Don't be afraid of being emotional. You won't die of it

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.

CAIUS MARCIUS: GO FUCK YOURSELF

Exuberance draws people together and primes them to act boldly; it warrants that the immediate world is safe for exploration and enjoyment and creates a vivifying climate in which a group can rekindle its collective mental and physical energies if depleted by setback, stress, or aggression. It answers despair with hope: "How I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm," wrote John Osborne in Look Back in Anger. "Just enthusiasm-that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive." By capturing many in its far-flung web, exuberance overrides the inhibition that blocks action or innovation; like other positive emotions, it also enhances learning and fosters communal generosity. Infectious joy pumps life into social bonds and creates new ones through collective celebration and lively exchange. Shared joys rather than shared sufferings make a friend, Nietzsche believed, and there is much truth in this. High spirits beget high spirits; the memory of delight is laid down, the expectation of joy seeded.

Joseph Kearns as the Crazy Quilt Dragon. Hanley Stafford as Snapper Snitch the Crocodile. Howard McNear as Samuel the Seal and as Slim Pickins the Cowboy. Elvia Allman as Penelope the Pelican. Elliott Lewis as Mr. Presto the Magician. Lou Merrill as Santa Claus. Frank Nelson as Captain Tin Top. Cy Kendall as Captain Taffy the Pirate and as the Indian Chief. Gale Gordon as Weary Willie the Stork and as the Ostrich. Ted Osborne as Professor Whiz the Owl.

The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn was charged with creating a positive campaign, and The Cavalcade of America was its answer. In the beginning, in its CBS run, Cavalcade was a stale and predictable package. Du Pont was obviously gunshy: nothing could be used that even hinted of its wartime activities. Erik Barnouw, who wrote for the show and later authored a three-volume history of radio, summed it up. There could be no war on Cavalcade: “Battle scenes were not permitted…. The sound of a shot was taboo…. Even explosions were for many years forbidden. The atmosphere was pacifist and highly idealistic. The progress of women was frequently celebrated.

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.

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.

Sharing Each week, we will take time to share what is happening in our lives. At first this sharing will include some planned “sharing questions.” After the first few weeks, it will become more informal and personal as our group feels safer and more comfortable. Study Each week we’ll study a portion of God’s Word that relates to the previous weekend’s sermon. Our goal is to learn how to apply and live out our Christianity in our day-to-day experiences and relationships. Support Each week, we’ll learn how to take care of one another as Christ commanded (see John 15:9–13). This care will take many forms, such as praying, listening, meeting needs, and encouraging and even challenging one another as needed. Five Marks of a Healthy Group For our group to be healthy, we need to 1. focus on spiritual growth as a top priority (Romans 8:29); 2. accept one another in love just as Christ has accepted us (Romans 15:7); 3. take care of one another in love without crossing over the line into parenting or taking inappropriate responsibility for solving the problems of others (John 13:34); 4. treat one another with respect in both speech and action (Ephesians 4:25–5:2); 5. keep our commitments to the group—including attending regularly, doing the homework, and keeping confidences whenever requested (Psalm 15:1–2, 4b). Guidelines and Covenant 1. Dates We’ll meet on ____________ nights for ____________ weeks. Our final meeting of the quarter will be on. 2. Time We’ll arrive between ____________ and ____________ and begin the meeting at ____________. We’ll spend approximately ____________ minutes in singing (optional),____________ minutes in study/ discussion, and ____________ minutes in prayer/sharing. 3. Children Group members are responsible to arrange childcare for their children. Nursing newborns are welcome, provided they are not a distraction to the group. 4. Study Each week, we’ll study the same topic(s) covered in the previous weekend’s sermon. 5. Prayer Our group will be praying each week for one another and specific missions requests. 6. Homework and Attendance Joining a growth group requires a commitment to attend each week and to do the homework ahead of time. Obviously, allowances are made for sickness, vacation, work conflicts, and other special events—but not much more! This commitment is the key to a healthy group. Most weeks, the homework will require from twenty to thirty minutes to adequately prepare for the group study and discussion. If we cannot come to a meeting, we will ________________________________ 7. Refreshments 8. Social(s) 9.

Osborne said. “I miss Mom, though. That didn’t have to happen. The guy who killed her . . . If I knew who it was, I’d think about killing him myself.” “Not what you usually want to tell a couple of cops,” Jenkins said. “Now if he gets run over by a car, people are going to be looking at your front bumper.” “Okay, so I’ll back over him,” Osborne said.

Although at the age of twenty-eight I had become preposterously famous, I was still partially gagged by the indoctrination of aggrieved lower-middle-class humility. In my work I had not dissembled, I was sure of that, but the nagging inheritance of 'Who do you think you are?' is hard to drown out in the presence of those who seem to have an ironclad awareness of who they are.

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.

In spite of the concerted press campaign to transform me into some upstart wordsmith who had inexplicably won the pools ('Osborne mellows now he's on £1,000 a week'), I was not earning great sums from any of the three plays now that tow of them had finished their Broadway runs.

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.

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.

...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.

Caution is evil medicine to me, even when it seems to guarantee reward. It was a foretaste of my later conviction that the follies which a man regrets most are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

George Devine's disapproval of Fry, Ustinov and John Whiting was almost startling in its bitterness: 'They're all absolute shit.' It was a little breathtaking. I was only accustomed to this kind of throw-away vehemence from myself.

Like all obsessive characters, Merrick was inordinately boring. He was uninterested in books, music, politics, people or, seemingly, even sex. His studied politeness was a mask that must conceal a slow-boiling malevolence. I can't see what he could have responded to in an irrepressible jokesmith like Jimmy Porter. He could squeeze out a frosty smile only when someone like a lovingly hated star collapsed with coronary.

Like most actors, she was hysterical when unemployed and resentful when appearing every night to full houses. She also entertained the common belief that a writer is only working when he can be seen head down at his desk. Why are you drinking/dreaming/farting/fornicating instead of making typewriter noises?

You can't be happy when what you're doing is wrong, or is hurting someone else.

They all want to escape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all, from love... It's no good trying to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscle and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the whole idea of life, and become a saint because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world or the next.