Kenneth Tynan Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

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.

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.

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

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

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."

She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation.