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Best Tony Kushner Quotes & Sayings

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Top Best Tony Kushner Quotes

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Marcia Gay Harden

I played Laura Bush in a Tony Kushner piece, and afterward, I think my phones got tapped. — Marcia Gay Harden

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I never really feel that I'm stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there's no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it's a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it's a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it'd freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you're just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don't think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By David Levithan

We are your shadow uncles, your angel godfathers, your mother's or your grandmother's best friend from college, the author of that book you found in the gay section of the library. We are characters in a Tony Kushner play, or names on a quilt that rarely gets taken out anymore. We are the ghosts of the remaining older generation. You know some of our songs. We do not want to haunt you too somberly. We don't want our legacy to be gravitas. You wouldn't want to live your life like that, and you won't want to be remembered like that, either. Your mistake would be to find our commonality in our dying. The living part mattered more. We taught you how to dance. — David Levithan

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

PRIOR: Why does everyone here play cards?
...
RABBI CHEMELWITZ: Cards is strategy but mostly a game of chance. In Heaven, everything is known. To the Great Questions are lying about here like yesterday's newspaper all the answers. So from what comes the pleasures of Paradise? Indeterminacy! Because mister, with the Angels, may their names be always worshipped and adored, it's all gloom and doom and give up already. But still is there Accident, in this pack of playing cards, still is there the Unknown, the Future. You understand me? It ain't all so much mechanical as they think. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

HANNAH: You had a vision.
PRIOR: A vision. Thank you, Maria Ouspenskaya. I'm not so far gone I can be assuaged by pity and lies.
HANNAH: I don't have pity. It's just not something I have.
(Little pause)
One hundred and seventy years ago, which is recent, an angel of God appeared to Joseph Smith in upstate
New York, not far from here. People have visions.
PRIOR: But that's preposterous, that's ...
HANNAH: It's not polite to call other people's beliefs preposterous.
He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that.
PRIOR: I don't. And I'm sorry but it's repellent to me. So much of what you believe.
HANNAH: What do I believe?
PRIOR: I'm a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you ...
HANNAH: No you can't. Imagine. The things in my head.
You don't make assumptions about me, mister; I won't make them about you. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By 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 Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.' — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back ... " To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais ... — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I hate America. I hate this country. It's just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that's hard enough, I don't have to love it. You do that. Everybody's got to love something. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

Harper: You, the one part of
the real world I wasn't allergic to. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

Here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

Real love isn't ever ambivalent, — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions ... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing? — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites ... some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I just wondered what a thing it would be ... if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.
It would be ... heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and ...
Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable and evil. It's only a part of me, but it's there, and it's active. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

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. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough. — Tony Kushner

Best Tony Kushner Quotes By Tony Kushner

My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over 'Perestroika.' It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to 'Lincoln.' — Tony Kushner