Kenneth Tynan's Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I perceived how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.

And as the circumcised in the flesh, and not in the heart, have no part in God's good promises; even so they that be baptized in the flesh, and not in heart, have no part in Christ's blood.

My overcoat is worn out; my shirts also are worn out. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.

Here is also to be noted, that the cause of the institution was to be a memorial, to testify that Christ's body was given, and his blood shed for us.

No more doth it hurt to say that the body and blood are not in the sacrament.

Christ made the bread the sacrament of his body only: wherefore as the bread is no similitude of his blood, so am I not bound or ought to affirm, that his blood is there present.

I know divers, and divers men know me, which love me as I do them: yet if I should pray them, when I meet them in the street openly, they would abhor me; but if I pray them where they be appointed to meet me secretly, they will hear me and accept my request.

In the old covenants the people were sprinkled with blood of calves without, in their bodies, to bind them to keep the law; else we were bound to just damnation, for the breaking of it.

Many things there be in the scripture, which have a carnal fulfilling, even there where they be spoken or done; and yet have another spiritual signification, to be fulfilled long after in Christ and his kingdom, and yet never known till the thing be done.

Neither was there any heresy, or diversity of opinion, or disputing about the matter, till the pope had gathered a council to confirm this transubstantiation: wherefore it is most likely that this opinion came up by them of latter days.