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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.

Kenneth Tynan

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Kenneth Tynan
Age: 53 †
Born: 1927
Born: April 2
Died: 1980
Died: July 26
Actor
Critic
Diarist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Theatre Critic
Writer
Birmingham
West Midlands
Kenneth Peacock Tynan
Ken Tynan
Truth
Produce
Intuition
Intuitions
Emotion
Claim
Rests
Personal
Arguing
Solely
Doubt
Main
Doubts
Feeling
Intense
Tends
Society
Emotions
Appeal
Future
Claims
Argue
Spokesmen
Feelings
Whose
Appeals
Bearers

More quotes by Kenneth Tynan

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Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.
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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.
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Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself
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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.
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Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the making of a dramatist.
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A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping.
Kenneth Tynan
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Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.
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I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.
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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.
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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.
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A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
Kenneth Tynan
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I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.
Kenneth Tynan
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A useful word previously unknown to me: 'ergophobia', meaning 'fear or hatred of work'. At last I can define myself in one word.
Kenneth Tynan
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It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
Kenneth Tynan
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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.
Kenneth Tynan
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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.
Kenneth Tynan
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Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.
Kenneth Tynan
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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.
Kenneth Tynan
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The vengeful hag is played by Ingrid Bergman, which is like casting Eleanor Roosevelt as Lizzie Borden.
Kenneth Tynan
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There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.
Kenneth Tynan