13 quotes
We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
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)
Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
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)
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)
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)
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.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
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.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
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."
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
People have always needed art: but why have they needed it? And what shaped the forms by which they satisfied their need? … In the arts form tends to be conservative, and content to be revolutionary; it is novelty of content that precedes, demands and imposes novelty of form.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
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.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
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.
Tynan Right and Left (1967)