Looking Back Quotes

“There is no real communication with those we love most”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“It is better to be a has-been than a never-was”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“(Charles) Laughton was one of the most pugnaciously morose men I had ever met. His huge talent seemed to endorse his implacable resentment. His Caliban self-portraiture must have been further agnozied by being incarcerated, like so many of his unhappy generation, in that closet which dared not speak its name. Even his large collection of Klees and Kokoshchkas was displayed as trophies of martyrdom rather than joyful plunder.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“...I remembered Binkie throwing a few chips of encouragement to me as he said, with a gleam of disaffection, 'Of course, Noel's quite uneducated.' Whether it implied that the Master was as unashamedly ignorant as myself, expelled and barely literate at fifteen, condemned to a fixed condition of 'not being ready for it yet', I hadn't resolved. It merely seemed a piece of clumsy treachery, a fair example of the reverence for academic skill and a classic misapprehension of its link with creative imagination. Even Binkie, from his own more distinguished production, could have deduced that from Shakespeare to Shaw a little Latin and less Greek, or none of either, did no damage to untutored dramatists.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Most playwrights should observe the same constitutional rights as the Queen: to be consulted, to advise and to warn.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Penelope shared the public's illusion that writing is something that you sit down and do at prescribed sittings, and not that it is something that must be lived daily amid preoccuptions that have nothing to do putting together sentences - ordinary activities like cooking, going to the races, walking the dogs, seeing a bad movie and not writing about it, reading only for pleasure, going to pubs, the seaside, church. Not for her: embassy supper was obligatory, the church fete a tiresome frivolity.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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?”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Kelvinist and Calvinist, schoolgirlishly light-hearted, she stood out in Manhattan like a Welsh miner at a bar mitzvah.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“Don't be afraid of being emotional. You won't die of it”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“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.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise