Kenneth Tynan Quotes
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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.
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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.
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A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.
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I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.
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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.
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A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.
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A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If a play does anything either tragically or comically satirically or farcically - to explain to me why I am alive, it is a good play. If it seems unaware that such questions exist, I tend to suspect that it's a bad one.
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Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.
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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.
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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.
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A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
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Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.
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His puritan, muscular, moor-tramping soul (superbly mirrored in Higgins's hymn to the intellect in Pygmalion) bred in him a loathing of all things, whether poems or gadgets, that were designed to comfort the human condition without actively trying to improve it.
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The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
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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.
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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.
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A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.
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Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls.
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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.
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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.