Tony Kushner Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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When you're doing a car chase movie, you're sitting in car waiting for places or grips or stuff for quite a while.
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Some borrowers are pretty damn good at fraud.
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I was certainly a better actor after my five years in Hollywood. I had learned to be natural - never to exaggerate. I found I could act on the stage in just the same way as I had acted in a studio: using my ordinary voice, eliminating gestures, keeping everything extremely simple.
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Every member in Congress has a seat, and they deserve a seat at the table.
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Once I finished 'Sicario,' I knew I wanted to follow it up with 'Hell or High Water.'
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An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.
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Hamas has effectively kidnapped Gaza. Instead of turning it into the Singapore of the Middle East that was promised, they have turned it into a fortress of terror.
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Without vanity, without coquetry, without curiosity, in a word, without the fall, woman would not be woman. Much of her grace is in her frailty.
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The most interesting thing about a postage stamp is the persistence with which it sticks to its job.
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I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.
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Creating more and better jobs is how you build a strong economy.
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It's one of the hardest things in life - choosing your own name.
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I think that 'Lost' is a bit of a dinosaur in terms of the type of show it is. The economics just don't support making a show this big and complicated profitable enough for a network.
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I have the rare privilege of talking to my dad every night at 10 p.m. and hearing about what he did that day.
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I could have taken the easy life and just done classical, but I felt very strongly about the album, my first pop album, the first time that I'd fused so many influences. I was very proud when it was in the charts in 25 countries at once.
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Christianity doesn't demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don't remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.
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If America is truly Israel's greatest ally, we should not be asking it to put its citizens and future at risk by forcing the establishment of a hostile Palestinian state as the only option.
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Whether I'm wearing lots of makeup or no makeup, I'm always the same person inside.
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I was given some designer colors for ink pens a long time ago and I haven't used them, and I have some handmade paper, and I just have the desire to drip on wet paper. It reminds me of when I was seven years old and had my tonsils out, and one of the first artworks I made was on toilet paper with a colored pencil; it was sort of half paint and half colored pencil. But I got very involved with color and absorption and I think, you know, 78 is a good time to go back to the beginning.
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When it comes to racial issues, I'm very passionate about young girls just loving who they are in their own skin. Because I remember going to an all-white school and being the only black girl in an all-white school, think - looking around me, thinking there's no one else here that looks like me.
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I often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I'm lying in bed I think up stories. That's where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I'm reading - sometimes reading someone else's stories will make me think of one of my own.
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Music can tear me up inside.
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Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.
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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.
