Kenneth Tynan Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'.

A dramatist is a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom.

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."

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.

Pornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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