Tony Kushner Quotes
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If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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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Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.
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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.
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I've never seen a great actor do a major role that didn't cost a lot. They're sacrificial animals of a sort.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.
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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.