60 Quotes by 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.

I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair.

All of life is more or less what the French would call s'imposer, to be able to create one's own terms for what one does.

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.

Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.

A critic is a man who knows the way but can’t drive the car.

When you’ve seen all of Ionesco’s plays, I felt at the end, you’ve seen one of them.

A villain who shares one’s guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one’s innocence.

It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.