Kenneth Tynan quotes

Kenneth Tynan was a renowned British theatre critic and writer, celebrated for his sharp wit and influential reviews. His work shaped the landscape of modern theatre criticism and pushed the boundaries of cultural commentary. He became known for advocating innovative productions and challenging theatrical censorship. Here are 46 of his quotes:

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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."

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan

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.

Kenneth Tynan