Theres a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility. – 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
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
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
And I think we understand we cannot make social change for all workers until we have enough strength, membership strength, and at the same time having membership strength and only making change for a limited group of workers is not what our country really needs for people that work. – Andy Stern