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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.

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
Rivals
Ireland
Sophisticated
Sheridan
Produced
Shaw
Brought
Wilde
England
Nearest
Like
Playwright
William

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There, standing at the piano, was the original good time who had been had by all.
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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.
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Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.
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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.
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Everyone is vulnerable who is at once gifted and gregarious.
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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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It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
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When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.
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The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional.
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A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
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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.
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A neurosis is a secret that you don’t know you are keeping.
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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.
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I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure.
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The man who reacts to the universe with a cry of impotent anguish is acceptable as an artist only if he can persuade us that he has sanely considered the other possible reactions and found them inadequate.
Kenneth Tynan
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The vengeful hag is played by Ingrid Bergman, which is like casting Eleanor Roosevelt as Lizzie Borden.
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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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Dichotomy = operation performed on lesbians to make them normal.
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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.
Kenneth Tynan