Top 100 Tony Kushner Quotes

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

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #902
#2. I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable and evil. It's only a part of me, but it's there, and it's active.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #7351
#3. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #7578
#4. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #34789
#5. You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #36107
#6. In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #37871
#7. My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #72035
#8. As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #103195
#9. One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #108537
#10. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #120910
#11. Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #125827
#12. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #130264
#13. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #166392
#14. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #168654
#15. If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin?

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #195297
#16. MATAMORE: I never fight with my love face on,
I worry that it might get scratched.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #197271
#17. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #206780
#18. Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #216695
#19. The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #230797
#20. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #233825
#21. You're a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #250015
#22. At least I never voted Republican. -Tony Kushner

Larry Smith

Tony Kushner Quotes #273856
#23. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #279341
#24. You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #298573
#25. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #340088
#26. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #362433
#27. I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #363791
#28. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #401415
#29. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #418571
#30. I've been so lucky to work with some great, great writers: Tony Kushner and Yasmina Reza.

Marcia Gay Harden

Tony Kushner Quotes #422299
#31. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #423397
#32. Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #434828
#33. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #463653
#34. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #469575
#35. As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #470793
#36. Nothing's lost forever.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #504199
#37. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #513513
#38. If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #519695
#39. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #521301
#40. ANGEL: I I I I
Am the Bird of America, the Bald Eagle,
Continental Principality,
LUMEN PHOSPHOR FLUOR CANDLE!

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #525746
#41. Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #529785
#42. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #584273
#43. I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #611282
#44. It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #627303
#45. I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #639025
#46. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #642506
#47. I've always wondered ... what if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn't worth it?

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #644656
#48. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #663215
#49. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #670817
#50. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #676143
#51. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #681164
#52. The body is the garden of the soul.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #687591
#53. I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #691720
#54. YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #711417
#55. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #713746
#56. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #740724
#57. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #758367
#58. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #765374
#59. K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #766013
#60. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #773701
#61. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #775209
#62. I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #777782
#63. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #779407
#64. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #789969
#65. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #805127
#66. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #810291
#67. Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #814069
#68. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #826484
#69. It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #832716
#70. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #853885
#71. I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #867073
#72. If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #871620
#73. I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #891309
#74. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #906109
#75. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #966228
#76. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #973402
#77. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #986819
#78. PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty.
Very Steven Spielberg.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #994923
#79. Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1026738
#80. I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1035098
#81. Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1087857
#82. I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1091411
#83. The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1123332
#84. I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1131871
#85. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1138367
#86. Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1140498
#87. Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1141825
#88. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1145420
#89. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1145888
#90. Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1152264
#91. I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1155123
#92. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1158896
#93. There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1164366
#94. I played Laura Bush in a Tony Kushner piece, and afterward, I think my phones got tapped.

Marcia Gay Harden

Tony Kushner Quotes #1170562
#95. There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1172218
#96. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1176273
#97. The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1181922
#98. It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes #1185753
#99. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1187127
#100. 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

Tony Kushner Quotes #1188616

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