John Osborne Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

Reason and Progress, the old firm, is selling out! Everyone get out while the going's good. Those forgotten shares you had in the old traditions, the old beliefs are going up—up and up and up.

John Osborne
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.

John Osborne
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.

John Osborne
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. Because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world or the next.

John Osborne
Anyone who's never watched somebody die is suffering from a pretty bad case of virginity.

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

John Osborne
Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only got ourselves.

John Osborne
A real pro is a real man, all he needs is an old backcloth behind him and he can hold them on his own for half an hour. He's like the general run of people, only he's a lot more like them than they are themselves, if you understand me.

John Osborne
I have only one regret remaining now in this matter of Adolf. It is simply that I was unable to look down upon her open coffin and, like that bird in the Book of Tobit, drop a good, large mess in her eye.

John Osborne
We all of us waited for him to die. The family sent him a check every month, and hoped he'd get on with it quietly, without too much vulgar fuss.

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

John Osborne
Inside every playwright there is a Falstaff, gathering like a boil to be lanced by his liege employers – fashion and caprice.

John Osborne
What we remember is what we become. What we have forgotten is more kindly and disturbs only our dreams. We become resemblances of our past.

John Osborne