Quotes from John Osborne

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

Writers don't need love; all they require is money.

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

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.

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

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

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

The whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place. People are doing it around you all the time. They give up their careers, say - or their beliefs - or sex.

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

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

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.

I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age—unless you're an American, of course.

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

Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

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

Censorship is the commonest social blasphemy because it is mostly concealed, built into us by indolence, self-interest and cowardice.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.