61 Kenneth Tynan Quotes

Kenneth Tynan quotes

1. 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.

2. John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre - a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity.

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

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

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

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.'

10. 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.

11. Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful. The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself. (p. 61)

15. Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls. (p. 65)

16. What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. (p. 79)

17. 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. (p. 97)

18. 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. (p. 102)

19. His puritan, muscular, moor-tramping soul (superbly mirrored in Higgins's hymn to the intellect in Pygmalion) bred in him a loathing of all things, whether poems or gadgets, that were designed to comfort the human condition without actively trying to improve it. (p. 103)

20. Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art. (p. 208)

21. Her style looks absurdly simple- an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable. (p. 215)

22. She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation. (p. 217)

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

24. I believe in neither a director's nor a writer's theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.

25. I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word 'fuck' is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.

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

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

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

29. 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.

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

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

32. 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.

33. I do not see the EEC as a great love affair. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.

34. It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.

1. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

7. 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.

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

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

10. Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.

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

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

13. As times change, you want to really revere your heredity, but you don't want to be a shrine.. to light candles and kneel.

14. 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."

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

16. 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.

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

18. 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.

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

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

21. I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

22. 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.

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

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

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

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

27. “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.”