6 Kenneth Tynan Quotes on Criticism

Kenneth Tynan quotes on criticism

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.

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

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.

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.'

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)

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