Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise
John Osborne
Top 10 Best Quotes
“[my father] usually concealed his rages with unconvincing politeness to contain his sparse energy, an instinct I may have inherited”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“There is no real communication with those we love most”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
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