Kenneth Tynan Quotes

30 quotes in 401 categories

• A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
• 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…
• 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…
• Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clenches his fist.
• A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping.
• It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
• The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.
• What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.
• We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.
• 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.
• Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.
• The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
• Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.
• 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…
• Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself
• 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…
• Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.
• There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.
• A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.
• A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

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