Kenneth Tynan quotes - page 2

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. (Kenneth Tynan)
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a peeping Tom, and I will show you the makings of a dramatist. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
If a play does anything either tragically or comically satirically or farcically - to explain to me why I am alive, it is a good play. If it seems unaware that such questions exist, I tend to suspect that it's a bad one. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls. (Kenneth Tynan)
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
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. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
I believe in neither a director's nor a writer's theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
People have always needed art: but why have they needed it? View quote
Kenneth Tynan
A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
[A]t the end he had broken through frontiers of language and feeling that one had hitherto thought inviolable ... (Kenneth Tynan)