Quotes by Kenneth Tynan

“Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“What when drunk one sees in other women one sees in Garbo sober.”

“All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer - to be able to create one's own terms for what one does.”

“A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.”

“What when drunk one sees in other women one sees in Garbo sober.”

“A novel is a static thing that one moves through a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.”

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

“Useless, of course, to point out that the genesis of good plays is hardly ever abstract; that it tends, on the contrary, to be something as concrete and casual as a glance intercepted, a remark ove...”

“Lenny Bruce ... [is] the most original, free-speaking, wild-thinking gymnast of language this inhibited island has ever engaged to amuse its citizens.”

“[A]t the end he had broken through frontiers of language and feeling that one had hitherto thought inviolable ...”

“I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should ...”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 differe...”