Tony Kushner Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.

Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

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

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.

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

I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

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

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

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

Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.

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 work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.

Real love isn't ever ambivalent.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.

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.

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.

The body is the garden of the soul.

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.

The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.

I've never seen a great actor do a major role that didn't cost a lot. They're sacrificial animals of a sort.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

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

It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.