Top 35 Kenneth Tynan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.”

— Kenneth Tynan

2. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

3. “Pornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good.”

— Kenneth Tynan

4. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

5. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

6. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

7. “A villain who shares one’s guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one’s innocence.”

— Kenneth Tynan

8. “We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.”

— Kenneth Tynan

9. “The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.”

— Kenneth Tynan

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

— Kenneth Tynan

11. “When you’ve seen all of Ionesco’s plays, I felt at the end, you’ve seen one of them.”

— Kenneth Tynan

12. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

13. “The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding, the chin in doubt, and the chin at bay.”

— Kenneth Tynan

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

— Kenneth Tynan

15. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

16. “A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.”

— Kenneth Tynan

17. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

18. “Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.”

— Kenneth Tynan

19. “Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.”

— Kenneth Tynan

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

— Kenneth Tynan

21. “I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.”

— Kenneth Tynan

22. “Among the classic tastes: bread sauce, Nuits St Georges Les Perdrix 1962, Worcestershire sauce, Toblerone and Bovril.”

— Kenneth Tynan

23. “It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.”

— Kenneth Tynan

24. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

25. “Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.”

— Kenneth Tynan

26. “Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.”

— Kenneth Tynan

27. “Coming to New York from the muted mistiness of London, as I regularly do, is like travelling from a monochrome antique shop to a technicolor bazaar.”

— Kenneth Tynan

28. “There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.”

— Kenneth Tynan

29. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

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

— Kenneth Tynan

31. “Western man, especially the Western critic, still find it very had to go into print and say: “I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection.””

— Kenneth Tynan

32. “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.”

— Kenneth Tynan

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

— Kenneth Tynan

34. “Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clenches his fist.”

— Kenneth Tynan

35. “All of life is more or less what the French would call s’imposer, to be able to create one’s own terms for what one does.”

— Kenneth Tynan

36. “A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.”

— Kenneth Tynan

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

— Kenneth Tynan

38. “If there’s one thing I can’t bear, it’s people who are wise during the event.”

— Kenneth Tynan

39. “Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself.”

— Kenneth Tynan