Kenneth Tynan Quotes

A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping.

Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional.

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.

All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer, to be able to create one's own terms for what one does.

I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clenches his fist.

It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

The vengeful hag is played by Ingrid Bergman, which is like casting Eleanor Roosevelt as Lizzie Borden.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.

William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced; and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland.

Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding, the chin in doubt, and the chin at bay.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.

When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.

If there's one thing I can't bear, it's people who are wise during the event.

A useful word previously unknown to me: 'ergophobia', meaning 'fear or hatred of work'. At last I can define myself in one word.

The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.

A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.

We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.

There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.

A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.

Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.

Among the classic tastes: bread sauce, Nuits St Georges Les Perdrix 1962, Worcestershire sauce, Toblerone and Bovril.

Western man, especially the Western critic, still find it very had to go into print and say: "I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection."

Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.

The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.

What when drunk one sees in other women one sees in Garbo sober.

All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer - to be able to create one's own terms for what one does.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.