Kenneth Tynan Quotes

1927–1980 England

Kenneth Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was a British theatre critic, author and literary manager of London's National Theatre Conmpany for a decade from 1963.

England
Journalists

Also known as: Tynan, Kenneth

Random Kenneth Tynan quote

39 quotes

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

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

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

Profiles (1990)

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.

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

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.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

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.

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

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

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.

Profiles (1990)

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.

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a peeping Tom, and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.

Pausing on the Stairs (1957)

Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls.

Profiles (1990)

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

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

Curtains (1961)

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

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.

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

The Life of Kenneth Tynan (1987)

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.

Tynan Right and Left (1967)

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

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source.

Curtains (1961)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kenneth Tynan (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.