Kenneth Tynan Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Kenneth Tynan
When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.

Kenneth Tynan
Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Kenneth Tynan
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.

Kenneth Tynan
The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.

Kenneth Tynan
She has sex but no positive gender. Her masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.

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

Kenneth Tynan
Her style looks absurdly simple — an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable.

Kenneth Tynan
The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

Kenneth Tynan
Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car.

Kenneth Tynan
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.

Kenneth Tynan
Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls.

Kenneth Tynan
I do not see the European Economic Community as a great love affair. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.

Kenneth Tynan
Of Polish director Roman Polanski:
The four foot Pole you wouldn't want to touch with a ten foot pole.

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

Kenneth Tynan
In most writers, style is a welcome, an invitation, a letting down of the drawbridge between the artist and the world. Shaw had no time for such ruses. Unlike most of his countrymen, he abominated charm, which he regarded as evidence of chronic temperamental weakness.

Kenneth Tynan
'Sergeant Pepper'—a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilization.

Kenneth Tynan
I believe in neither a director's nor a writer's theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.

Kenneth Tynan