Kenneth Tynan Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

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

Kenneth Tynan
I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word "fuck" is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.

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

Kenneth Tynan
As Virgilia in Coriolanus she yearns so hungrily that I longed to throw her a fish.
Of Claire Bloom in 1955

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

Kenneth Tynan
They say The New Yorker is the bland leading the bland. I don't know if I'm bland enough.

Kenneth Tynan
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.

Kenneth Tynan
A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you're keeping.

Kenneth Tynan
Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a peeping Tom and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.

Kenneth Tynan
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.

Kenneth Tynan
I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair."

Kenneth Tynan
All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad.

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

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
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
A play... is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.

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