Tony Kushner Quotes

#1. In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.

Tony Kushner

#2. You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

Tony Kushner

#3. You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.

Tony Kushner

#4. My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.

Tony Kushner

#5. One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

Tony Kushner

#6. HARPER: I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you.

Tony Kushner

#7. Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Tony Kushner

#8. The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it.

Tony Kushner

#9. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there's still the rest of you. There's your breasts, and your genitals, and they're amazingly stupid, like babies or faithful dogs, they don't get it, they just want him. Want him.

Tony Kushner

#10. You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.

Tony Kushner

#11. If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.

Tony Kushner

#12. Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.

Tony Kushner

#13. The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

Tony Kushner

#14. You're a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.

Tony Kushner

#15. Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.

Tony Kushner

#16. You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Tony Kushner

#17. Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

Tony Kushner

#18. People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

Tony Kushner

#19. I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.

Tony Kushner

#20. People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively.

Tony Kushner

#21. I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

Tony Kushner

#22. When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

Tony Kushner

#23. Oh you only think you know all I know. I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow,

Tony Kushner

#24. As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

Tony Kushner

#25. Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.

Tony Kushner

#26. Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.

Tony Kushner

#27. ANGEL: I I I I
Am the Bird of America, the Bald Eagle,
Continental Principality,
LUMEN PHOSPHOR FLUOR CANDLE!

Tony Kushner

#28. It's no fun picking on you Louis; you're so guilty, it's like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there's no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.

Tony Kushner

#29. It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

Tony Kushner

#30. The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being.

Tony Kushner

#31. I've always wondered ... what if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn't worth it?

Tony Kushner

#32. I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York to go to Columbia, every time I went into the subway I was absolutely astounded because you see people from all over the world who actually live here - who aren't just here as tourists.

Tony Kushner

#33. So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.

Tony Kushner

#34. One of the things I learned in 'Slavs!' is that it's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them.

Tony Kushner

#35. Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

Tony Kushner

#36. YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS.

Tony Kushner

#37. The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come.

Tony Kushner

#38. They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench - Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And

Tony Kushner

#39. The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.

Tony Kushner

#40. When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.

Tony Kushner

#41. K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

Tony Kushner

#42. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.

Tony Kushner

#43. I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I'm surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don't think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don't think anybody does.

Tony Kushner

#44. I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.

Tony Kushner

#45. My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over 'Perestroika.' It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to 'Lincoln.'

Tony Kushner

#46. The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.

Tony Kushner

#47. I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

Tony Kushner

#48. I fooled you, Ethel, I knew who you were all along. I can't believe you fell for that ma stuff. I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing!

Tony Kushner

#49. Before the boiling of blood and the searing of skin comes the secret catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.

Tony Kushner

#50. It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.

Tony Kushner

#51. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.

Tony Kushner

#52. I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

Tony Kushner

#53. If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with

Tony Kushner

#54. I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

Tony Kushner

#55. One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid ... One wants ... But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?

Tony Kushner

#56. I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.

Tony Kushner

#57. Here's another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.

Tony Kushner

#58. Here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

Tony Kushner

#59. PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty.
Very Steven Spielberg.

Tony Kushner

#60. Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.

Tony Kushner

#61. I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.

Tony Kushner

#62. I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Tony Kushner

#63. The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.

Tony Kushner

#64. I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing.

Tony Kushner

#65. The fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told him I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean.

Tony Kushner

#66. JOE: You said my wife. And I want to know, is she -
PRIOR: TALK TO HER YOURSELF, BULLWINKLE! WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE A MARRIAGE COUNSELOR?

Tony Kushner

#67. Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

Tony Kushner

#68. You can't live in the world without an idea of the world, but it's living that makes the ideas. You can't wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.

Tony Kushner

#69. There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

Tony Kushner

#70. One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

Tony Kushner

#71. The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

Tony Kushner

#72. God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.

Tony Kushner

#73. I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back ... " To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais ...

Tony Kushner

#74. A play is never finished. You'll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament.

Tony Kushner

#75. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.

Tony Kushner

#76. Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

Tony Kushner

#77. I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.

Tony Kushner

#78. You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.

Tony Kushner

#79. When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.

Tony Kushner

#80. You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.

Tony Kushner

#81. ROY (Fierce): I hurt. BELIZE: I'll get you a painkiller. ROY: Will it knock me out? BELIZE: I sure hope so. ROY: Then shove it. Pain's ... nothing, pain's life. BELIZE: Sing it, baby.

Tony Kushner

#82. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

Tony Kushner

#83. The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.

Tony Kushner

#84. The dreams of the left are always beautiful - the imagining of a better world, the damnation of the present one. This faith, this luminescent anger - these are worthy of being called human. These are the Beautiful that an age produces.

Tony Kushner

#85. I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.

Tony Kushner

#86. We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.

Tony Kushner

#87. A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'

Tony Kushner

#88. You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of.

Tony Kushner

#89. I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.

Tony Kushner

#90. I've never seen a great actor do a major role that didn't cost a lot. They're sacrificial animals of a sort.

Tony Kushner

#91. Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone ... Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

Tony Kushner

#92. And 'Queer Eye' is fascinating. It has a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming quality. It's very bourgeois, of course, and much more about the liberation of the consumer than the liberation of the democratic citizen.

Tony Kushner

#93. And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I'm concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater.

Tony Kushner

#94. We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is ... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for ...

Tony Kushner

#95. The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

Tony Kushner

#96. Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.

Tony Kushner

#97. Sorry wrong room. (Prior exits, goes to Belize.) PRIOR (Despairing): He's the Marlboro Man. BELIZE: Oooh, I wanna see.

Tony Kushner

#98. I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

Tony Kushner

#99. I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about.

Tony Kushner

#100. The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

Tony Kushner