Quotes from John Osborne

empty things for empty men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CAIUS MARCIUS: GO FUCK YOURSELF

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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