John Osborne Quotes

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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