Tony Kushner Quotes
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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.
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One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.
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The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.
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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.'
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There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
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I think that everybody who writes believes that their work has some kind of use-value, for someone, that there's some need for it, some person or group of people out there has demanded that these words come into being. I think that you do the work for these people. You hope that you can make a living at it. Whatever your ambitions and needs are in that regard, your only real requirement is to try and dig as deeply as you can dig to make sense of the meaning of human existence.
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Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?
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What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but, unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient.
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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.
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Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.
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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.
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I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.
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I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.
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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.
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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.
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That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales.
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Part of what makes for good writing is an ear for what we would call the poetical. Poetry itself is another thing and it seems to me to be the most difficult writing - that those people are the best writers and they lead the way for everyone else and their writing is frighteningly great.
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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.
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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.
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I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die
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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.
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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.
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Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.
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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.
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You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.
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