Penelope Gilliatt Quotes

“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

“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