Kenneth Tynan Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional.

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.

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

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

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

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

Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

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

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

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.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.