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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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