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John Osborne Quotes

John James Osborne was an English playwright, screenwriter and actor, known for his excoriating prose and intense critical stance towards established social and political norms. The success of his 1956 play Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre.

In a productive life of more than 40 years, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and TV. His personal life was extravagant and iconoclastic. He was notorious for the ornate violence of his language, not only on behalf of the political causes he supported but also against his own family, including his wives and children.

Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. He was the first to question the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak , he helped make contempt an acceptable and now even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behaviour and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.



✵ 12. December 1929 – 24. December 1994   •   Other names John James Osborne
John Osborne photo

Works

Look Back in Anger
Look Back in Anger
John Osborne
The Entertainer
The Entertainer
John Osborne
John Osborne: 10   quotes 4   likes

Famous John Osborne Quotes

“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?”

John Osborne Look Back in Anger

Source: Look Back in Anger

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

John Osborne Look Back in Anger

Source: Look Back in Anger

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

John Osborne The Entertainer

Number 13; this, the music-hall entertainer Archie Rice's acid farewell to his audience, also appears on Osborne's gravestone https://web.archive.org/web/20071020084223/http://www.shropshiregallery.co.uk/towns/clun/IMG_0277.html.
The Entertainer (1957)

“Archie Rice: Don't clap too hard – it's a very old building.”

John Osborne The Entertainer

Number 7; said to have been an old joke in the music-halls at the time the play was written.
The Entertainer (1957)

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

John Osborne

Quoted in Time magazine, October 31, 1977. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,945814,00.html
Also attributed to Christopher Hampton by the Sunday Times Magazine (16 October 1977)

“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.”

John Osborne

Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Right and Left (1967) p. 13
Criticism

John Osborne Quotes

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

John Osborne Look Back in Anger

Look Back in Anger, Act II, sc. I (1956)

Time , Past

“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.”

John Osborne The Entertainer

Number 8
The Entertainer (1957)

Feeling , Dead

“George Dillon: [I]t's easy to answer the ultimate questions – it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.”

John Osborne

Epitaph for George Dillon, Act II (1957)
Co-written with Anthony Creighton.

Question

“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.”

John Osborne

"A Letter To My Fellow Countrymen", Tribune (18 August 1961)

Death , Men , Hate , Country

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