60 Quotes by Kenneth Tynan

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

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.

Forty years ago, he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.

Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'.

A dramatist is a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom.

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."

Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.

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.

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.