Kenneth Tynan Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.
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Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls.
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What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.