Kenneth Tynan (1927 – 1980)
British author most famous for his theatre criticism.
Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls.
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.
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.
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.
When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you're keeping.
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.
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.
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.
Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the 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.
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.