Kenneth Tynan (1927 – 1980)
British author most famous for his theatre criticism.
A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you're keeping.
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.
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation.
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.
I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.
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.
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.
Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.
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.