Haven't seen many Kenneth Tynan quotes lately...

[The Sanity Inspector]

...a pleasing but terribly sane little thing.
-- panning an actress performing Ophelia in a production of _Hamlet_

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

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

Even the youngest of us will know in fifty years time what we meant by
a 'very Noël Coward sort of person.'

Movies are the most dominant repository of memory we have.

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.

The study of actors should be a full-time task, worthy of the same
passionate scholarship which lepidopterists devote to butterflies.

Serious music dignifies our self pity.

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

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

One of my unarguable postulates about aesthetics is that life mimics
art, not art life.

Power is delightful and absolute power is absolutely delightful.

Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard
to go into print and say: "I recommend you to go and see this because
it gave me an erection."

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

We carry with us both the life that we have chosen and all the other
lives we might have led.

--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
-- The Jam

[Kenneth S.]

2 December. Entranced by TV appearance of the eighty-nine year-old
playwright Ben Travers. Very joyful old gentleman. He says that for
him the hub of Edwardian London was the gents' lavatory in Leicester
Square. He remembers it as entirely made of marble, with a plate-glass
tank above each urinal. In every tank swam twenty goldfish. When the
flush was released, the water-level would sink to a couple of inches.
"The fish would huddle together with consternation written all over
their faces. But then, as the tank refilled, you could see their
relief-life was beginning again." Travers says: "I often think-isn't
that a perfect image of human life as a whole? Disaster's about to
strike, and then life goes on, and we all breathe again."

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan. (edited by John Lahr)