All Quotes

"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."

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

"If a play does anything either tragically or comically satirically or farcically — to explain to me why I am alive, it is a good play. If it seems unaware that such questions exist, I tend to suspect that it's a bad 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."

"John Osborne spoke out in a vein of ebullient, free-wheeling rancour that betokened the arrival of something new in the theatre — a sophisticated, articulate lower-class. Most of the critics were offended by Jimmy Porter, but not on account of his anger; a working-class hero is expected to be angry. What nettled them was something quite different: his self-confidence. This was no envious inferior whose insecurity they could pity."

"People have always needed art: but why have they needed it? And what shaped the forms by which they satisfied their need? … In the arts form tends to be conservative, and content to be revolutionary; it is novelty of content that precedes, demands and imposes novelty of form."

"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."

"When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling."

"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.""

"Does the critic wish to influence the kind of film that costs more than £250,000? It is as if he were to send a postcard to General Motors explaining that he would like them to make a raft next year, or a helicopter, instead of a car."

"Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious."

"Judge and prosecutor had hammered it home that Lady Chatterly was an immoral woman, that she had had sexual relations before marriage, that she had committed adultery under her husband's roof; as if these charges somehow disqualified her from participation in serious literature. Indeed, there were long periods of the trial during which an outsider might well have assumed that a divorce case was being heard."

"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."

"One would have thought that the notion of an impersonal critic was as patently absurd as that of an impersonal person: yet playwrights still cherish it as a sort of holy ideal. Admittedly, we all make mystiques: but this one is particularly wishful. The man who asks for an anonymous, impersonal criticism is trying to elevate criticism to the status of a science; whereas it is, I am afraid, only an art. The critic's business is to write readable English: the playwright's to write speakable English. Beyond that it is every man for himself."

"Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls."

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

"All writing is an antisocial act, since the writer is a man who can speak freely only when alone; to be himself he must lock himself up, to communicate he must cut himself off from all communication; and in this there is something always a little mad."

"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."

"His puritan, muscular, moor-tramping soul (superbly mirrored in Higgins's hymn to the intellect in Pygmalion) bred in him a loathing of all things, whether poems or gadgets, that were designed to comfort the human condition without actively trying to improve it."

"Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art."

"Her style looks absurdly simple — an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable."

"She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation."

"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 do not see the EEC as a great love affair. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope."

"It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will."

"The hero of Tynan Right and Left is, as the title suggests, Tynan. The ostensible subject matter is of course wider, for the book consists of Tynan's writing over the past 10 years, not only in his capacities as theater and cinema reviewer but also as the author of occasional pieces, interviews and essays on a wide variety of people … But whatever he is writing about Tynan never forgets the subject on which he is the leading world expert: namely Kenneth Tynan, cultural journalist, moralist, socialist. "Occupation: opinion-monger observer of artistic phenomena, amateur ideologue.""

"Kanga said to Roo, "Drink up your milk first, dear, and talk afterwards." So Roo, who was drinking his milk, tried to say that he could do both at once . . . and had to be patted on the back and dried for quite a long time afterwards."

""H–hup!" said Roo accidentally. "Roo, dear!" said Kanga reproachfully. "Was it me?" asked Roo, a little surprised."

"Tynan's interests cover an unusually broad range, and his references are equally wide: How many other critics would quote Seneca on Humphrey Bogart or Coleridge on the Beatles? … As a theater critic he has been extremely influential, and always in useful directions. Sometimes his concern for the state of contemporary drama leads him to overestimate particular plays for their tactical importance in the struggle for the sort of theater he would like to see … the state of British theater is far healthier now than it was when Tynan first appeared on the scene, and for this he can take some credit. … Like all good critics sooner or later, he has come up against the form and content argument, and like all good critics (at least when it is put in either-or terms) he comes down on the side of content. … Like George Orwell he has the ability always to pick on the important issues even when briefly reviewing a film or play which is in itself of little interest. He raises the right questions even if he does not always come up with the right answers, and usually he does come up with the right answers. Almost without exception he is readable and stimulating, whatever the subject; he is very honest, and often funny. If he is too interested in himself, there are after all a lot of people who are much less interesting."

"Ken, the Tot of Destiny, had turned into the Marquis de Sade, and I in response had become a virago."

"They have almost brought it off, the War to End Peace, for which they have been striving for three years. What an incredible joke! A war 'to defend the freedom of the Straits and the sanctity of our graves in Gallipoli', says Punch magnificently. Of course you can think of it like that, and it sounds quite dignified and natural. But you may also think, as I do, of those five or ten or twenty men, our chosen statesmen, sitting round a table; the same old statesmen; each with his war memories thick upon him; each knowing his own utter incompetence to maintain a war or to end a war."

"Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Serajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more."

"I wrote somewhere once that the third-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the majority, the second-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind was only happy when it was thinking."

"They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace — Christopher Robin went down with Alice. They've great big parties inside the grounds. "I wouldn't be king for a hundred pounds", Says Alice."

"James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree Took great care of his mother Though he was only three. James James said to his mother Mother he said, said he: You mustn't go down to the end of the town if you don't go down with me. James James Morrison's Mother Put on a golden gown. James James Morrison's Mother Went to the end of the town James James Morrison's Mother Said to herself, said she: I can go right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea!"

"Halfway down the stairs Is a stair Where I sit. There isn't any Other stair Quite like It. I'm not at the bottom, I'm not at the top; So this is the stair Where I always Stop. Halfway up the stairs Isn't up, Isn't down. It isn't in the nursery, It isn't in the town. And all sorts of funny thoughts Run round my head: "It isn't really Anywhere! It's somewhere else Instead!""

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think about it."

""If there's a buzzing-noise, somebody's making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you're a bee." Then he thought another long time, and said: "And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey." And then he got up, and said: "And the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it." So he began to climb the tree."

"Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, "Honey or condensed milk with your bread?" he was so excited that he said, "Both," and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, "But don't bother about the bread, please.""

""What?" said Piglet, with a jump. And then, to show that he hadn't been frightened, he jumped up and down once or twice more in an exercising sort of way."

"I have been Foolish and Deluded," said he, "and I am a Bear of No Brain at All."

"These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST."

"I'm giving this to Eeyore," he explained, "as a present. What are you going to give?" "Couldn't I give it too?" said Piglet. "From both of us?" "No," said Pooh. "That would not be a good plan."

"It was just as if somebody inside him were saying, "Now then, Pooh, time for a little something.""

"Because my spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places."

"It is hard to be brave," said Piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal."

"Owl was telling Kanga an Interesting Anecdote full of long words like Encyclopædia and Rhododendron to which Kanga wasn't listening."

"It's a little Anxious," he said to himself, "to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water."

""Good morning, Pooh Bear", said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning", he said. "Which I doubt", said he."

"Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin."