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8 John Osborne Quotes

John Osborne presents blunt, angry commentary on anger, nation and warning that cuts straight to the bone.

John Osborne quotes

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

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  2. George Dillon: It's easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.

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  3. 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.

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

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    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

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

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  6. 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.

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

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  8. 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.

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