KENNETH TYNAN

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

A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.

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

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.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.

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.

A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.

A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.

A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.

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.

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.

If there's one thing I can't bear, it's people who are wise during the event.

We shall be judged by what we do, not by how we felt while we were doing it.

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

The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding, the chin in doubt, and the chin at bay.

The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.

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."

A useful word previously unknown to me: 'ergophobia', meaning 'fear or hatred of work'. At last I can define myself in one word.

Drama criticism ... is a self-knowing account of the way in which one's consciousness has been modified during an evening at the theatre.

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

Among the classic tastes: bread sauce, Nuits St Georges Les Perdrix 1962, Worcestershire sauce, Toblerone and Bovril.

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