Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Tynan
Kenneth Peacock Tynanwas an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at The Observer, he praised Osborne's Look Back in Anger, and encouraged the emerging wave of British theatrical talent. In 1963, Tynan was appointed as the new National Theatre Company's literary manager...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth2 April 1927
men artist cry
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.
artist style world
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.
art artist art-is
Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself
art essentials body
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.
art spring coherence
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.
art strong forever
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.
coward exactly fifty mean sort youngest
Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'.
dramatist instincts
A dramatist is a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom.
forty might pan peter slightly wholly
Forty years ago, he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.
men print critics
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."
vulnerable gregarious gifted
Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.
years car wish
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.
feelings doubt intuition
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.
play ends felt
When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.