Tony Kushner – Quotes Crazy

People shouldnt trust artists and they shouldnt trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it. – Tony Kushner

The kind of theater that I do is sort of narrative realism, which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Loris plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist. – Tony Kushner

Theres a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility. – Tony Kushner

You have a strange relationship with calamity when youre a writer: you write about it as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and thats a creepy thing to do. – Tony Kushner

I feel theres a power in theatre, but its an indirect power. Its like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you cant afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about. – Tony Kushner

I dont feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that Im a gay man. – Tony Kushner

You dont go to the movies to do historical research, unless its historical research about the movies. – Tony Kushner

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. Im not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations. – Tony Kushner

The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. Its a 14th Amendment issue. Theres no argument about it. – Tony Kushner

You have to have hope. Its irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think its irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. – Tony Kushner

A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, Uncle Toms Cabin and, in modern drama, Larry Kramers The Normal Heart. – Tony Kushner

The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that Lincoln is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, weve actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincolns presidency thats somewhat original. – Tony Kushner

Im happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was – but its 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 its not enough for me to live on and have health insurance. – Tony Kushner

I find writing very difficult. Its hard and it hurts sometimes, and its scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities. – Tony Kushner

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. – Tony Kushner

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

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. – Tony Kushner

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. – Tony Kushner

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete? – Tony Kushner