Kenneth Tynan Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 see in the papers that the singer, Frank Ifield, popular in the fifties, is planning a comeback. I remember reviewing his debut at the Palladium under the insane misapprehension that he was blind. (I had him confused with a blind vocalist who bore a similar name.) I watched agape with admiration while he strolled around the stage with every appearance of knowing where he was going, and I burst into spontaneous applause as he strode down to within a foot of the orchestra pit without the least sign of fear. By the end of his act I was misty with tears at the thought of his courage. I often wonder what he thought when he read the review in which I congratulated him on the gallantry with which he had overcome the handicap of sightlessness.

Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.

Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.