Quotes by Kenneth Tynan

• A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
• Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.
• What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.
• The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
• Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.
• 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.
• 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.
• A city whose living immediacy is so urgent that when I am in it I lose all sense of the past.
• A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.