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… - Kenneth Tynan

One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful. The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself.

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.

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.