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

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

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

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

Kenneth Tynan
Satire is protest, couched in wit, against the notion that there is anything more important than the fact that all men must die.

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

Kenneth Tynan
Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.
Of Noël Coward

Kenneth Tynan
Judge and prosecutor had hammered it home that Lady Chatterly was an immoral woman, that she had had sexual relations before marriage, that she had committed adultery under her husband's roof; as if these charges somehow disqualified her from participation in serious literature. Indeed, there were long periods of the trial during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard.

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

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

Kenneth Tynan
She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation.

Kenneth Tynan
Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art.

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

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

Kenneth Tynan
One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful. The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself.

Kenneth Tynan
How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself.

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

Kenneth Tynan
Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

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

Kenneth Tynan
Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.

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

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

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
Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

Kenneth Tynan