Kenneth Tynan Quotes

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

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.

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.

A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping.

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.

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 overheard, or an insignificant news item buried at the bottom of page three. Yet it is by trivialities like these that the true playwright's blood is fired. They spur him to story-telling; they bring on the narrative fit that is his glory and his basic credential. Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a peeping Tom, and I will show you the makings of a dramatist. Only the makings, of course: curiosity about people is merely the beginning of the road to the masterpiece: but if that curiosity is sustained you will find, when the rules have been mastered and the end has been reached, that a miracle has happened.

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.

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

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 disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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