Best 130 quotes of Tony Kushner on MyQuotes

Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama.

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Being on a film set is like being in tech forever. In theater, when you finally finish rehearsing, you go onstage and you do the lights and the sets and you make the machine of the production work. It takes usually about ten days in the theater, two or three weeks if it's a really big musical. I mean, it's hell on earth. You just sit around forever while they adjust the lights. And every playwright with half a brain runs for the hills when tech starts because it's so boring, and you don't want to talk to the director because the director is running this giant machine.

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.

But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic.

But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud.

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

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.

Film is like tech starts on the first day of filming and it never stops. There's never a moment when the audience comes in, you're just in tech forever, and I can't stand being on a film set. It's really tedious.

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.

Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.

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

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.

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.

I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.

I could give you absolutely sterling advice on how to avoid writing, how when you run out of things to do other than going to your desk and writing, when every closet is reorganized and you've called your oldest living relative twice in one day to see what she's up to and there isn't an unanswered e-mail left on your computer or you simply can't bear to answer another one and there is no dignity, not a drop left, in any further evasion of the task at hand, namely writing, well, you can always ask your dentist for a root canal or have an accident in the bathtub instead.

I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.

I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.

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.

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

I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

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.

I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it's a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won't even be bothered by the opinions. I'll make my own mind up.'

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.

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it.

I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

I have kind of an almost religious feeling about poets. I usually refuse to meet them because I admire them so much. Except for Poe.

I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free. It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and... Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.

I love musicals but it's very, very different. It's really just a different form than serious drama, and has very different rules and a completely different set of characters and requirements and ambitions. It maybe shouldn't be as separate as it is, but it's got a different history. In terms of serious drama, I think you'd have to say that you could break it down essentially into the narrative realist tradition and experimental theater.

I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.

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.

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.

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.

I'm happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was - but it's almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with 'Angels,' and it still generates income for me, but it's not enough for me to live on and have health insurance.

I'm in an odd place right now in New York where I routinely get trashed by every daily drama critic and have a few allies among weekly/monthly drama critics, and you sort of plot these things out and figure it out. But it's just what any writer goes through, periods of favor, periods of disfavor. And the trick is just to keep writing and to not let an obsession.