1. Kenneth Tynan Kenneth Peacock Tynan was an influential and often controversial British theatre critic and writer.He was born in Birmingham to Peter Tynan and Letitia Rose Tynan. As a child, he stammered but possessed early on a high degree of articulate more..more..

2. “ Kenneth Tynan:I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure. #Failure#Failure

3. “ Kenneth Tynan: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. #Truth#Truth

4. “ Kenneth Tynan: A critic is a man who knows the way, but can't drive the car. #Critics and Criticism#Critics and Criticism

5. “ Kenneth Tynan: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. #Conscience#Conscience

6. “ Kenneth Tynan:What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. (p. 79) #Acting and Actors#Acting and Actors

7. “ Kenneth Tynan:Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist. #Audiences#Audiences

8. “ Kenneth Tynan:We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it. #Judgment and Judges#Judgment and Judges

9. “ Kenneth Tynan:I believe in neither a director’s nor a writer’s theatre, but a theatre of intelligent audiences. I count myself as a member of an intelligent audience, and I wrote to you as such. That you should disagree with me I can understand, but that you should resent my expressing my opinions is something that frankly amazes me. I thought we had outgrown the idea of theatre as a mystic rite born of secret communion between author, director, actors and an empty auditorium. #Acting and Actors#Acting and Actors

10. “ Kenneth Tynan:Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car. #Politicians and Politics#Politicians and Politics

11. “ Kenneth Tynan:Any country that has sexual censorship will eventually have political censorship. #Censorship#Censorship

12. “ Kenneth Tynan: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. (p. 97) #Writers and Writing#Writers and Writing

13. “ Kenneth Tynan: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#Critics and Criticism

14. “ Kenneth Tynan: 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#Ideology

15. “ Kenneth Tynan: Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art. #Arts and Artists#Arts and Artists

16. “ Kenneth Tynan:She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation. (p. 217) #Alcohol and Alcoholism#Alcohol and Alcoholism

17. “ Kenneth Tynan:I do not see the EEC as a great love affair. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope. #Marriage#Marriage

18. “ Kenneth Tynan:A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping. #Neurosis#Neurosis

19. “ Kenneth Tynan:Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious. #Politicians and Politics#Politicians and Politics

20. “ Kenneth Tynan:A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence. #Heroes and Heroism#Heroes and Heroism

21. “ Kenneth Tynan: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#Arts and Artists

22. Related Authors on iWise About iWise Building the worlds wisdom engine. Follow us to get a brilliant quote of the day. You can customize which authors you get quotes from at www.iwise.comwww.iwise.com Paul Johnson Aubrey Beardsley Spencer Tracy Elaine Dundy Katharine Hepburn John Osborne