Kenneth Tynan Quotes

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

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

An office block made of prestressed celery.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!

It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.

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.

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

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.

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.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

The vengeful hag is played by Ingrid Bergman, which is like casting Eleanor Roosevelt as Lizzie Borden.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.