Daily Inspiration Quote by Kenneth Tynan

There is a delicious booby trap in Tynan's line: it flatters expertise while humiliating the expert. The critic "knows the way" suggests real literacy in form, history, and taste - the map is accurate. Then comes the sting: he "can't drive the car", a blunt little metaphor that recasts criticism as secondhand competence, all theory and no risk.

Tynan wrote as a critic who famously did drive: he shaped reputations, shook institutions, and helped modernize British theatre by pushing it toward sharper realism and less genteel hypocrisy. So the barb is also self-aware, even prophylactic. By conceding the classic charge against critics (they can't make), he steals some of its power and turns it into a comic truth about specialization. Knowing is not doing. Judgment is not performance.

The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-pretension. A good critic is not useless; he's a navigator, not a mechanic. The line mocks the critic who confuses navigation with virtuosity behind the wheel, the kind of commentator who scolds artists for not taking turns he himself couldn't manage at speed. At the same time, it nods to the artist's resentment: creation is public exposure, full of crashes and bad weather; criticism can feel like pointing at dents from a safe curb.

What makes the quote work is its economy and its asymmetry. It doesn't deny that the critic might be right about the route. It just insists that correctness, untested by stakes, is a thinner kind of authority - and that the arts, like driving, finally belong to whoever dares to move.