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. (Kenneth Tynan)
Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood. (Kenneth Tynan)
The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic. (Kenneth Tynan)
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. (Kenneth Tynan)
A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past. (Kenneth Tynan)
Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist. (Kenneth Tynan)
Even the youngest of us will know, in fifty years' time, exactly what we mean by 'a very Noel Coward sort of person'. (Kenneth Tynan)
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car. (Kenneth Tynan)
A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one. (Kenneth Tynan)
A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself. (Kenneth Tynan)
What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. (Kenneth Tynan)
William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland. (Kenneth Tynan)
No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world. (Kenneth Tynan)
Forty years ago he was Slightly in Peter Pan, and you might say that he has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since. (Kenneth Tynan)
A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping. (Kenneth Tynan)