Kenneth Tynan quotes

" A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car. " # Critics and Criticism

" A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping. " # Neurosis # Belief # Secrets

" 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. (p. 61) " # Critics and Criticism # Science and Scientists # Friends and Friendship

" Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art. " # Arts and Artists # Critics and Criticism # Life and Living

" 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 different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos. " # Ideology # Arts and Artists # Life and Living

" 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. " # Critics and Criticism # Theater # Entertainment

" When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them. " # Friends and Friendship

" A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence. " # Heroes and Heroism # Guilt # Villains

" We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it. " # Judgment and Judges

" 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. " # Arts and Artists # Love # Life and Living