Kushner Quotes & Sayings

I have six jobs. — Jared Kushner

Times were changing in the world of id. They had finally fired Jason, narrowing the group to Carmack, Romero, Adrian, and Tom. But something else was in the air. The Reagan-Bush era was finally coming to a close and a new spirit rising. It began in Seattle, where a sloppily dressed grunge rock trio called Nirvana ousted Michael Jackson from the top of the pop charts with their album Nevermind. Soon grunge and hip-hop were dominating the world with more brutal and honest views. Id was braced to do for games what those artists had done for music: overthrow the status quo. Games until this point had been ruled by their own equivalent of pop, in the form of Mario and Pac-Man. Unlike music, the software industry had never experienced anything as rebellious as Wolfenstein 3-D. The — David Kushner

I always thought, 'Will I go into the business, or will I not go into the business?' But when my father got arrested, I really didn't have a choice. I was the oldest son, and it was something that had to be done. — Jared Kushner

I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps. — Rachel Kushner

In a city where most of the wealth is controlled by a small few, certain things are overlooked, particularly when it comes to the assertion of privilege. — Ellen Kushner

Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don't care about the actual news, just that the radio is issuing a steadyish sound whose particulars they do not have to follow to understand what the radio is actually telling them: life is being lived. No need to be a part of it as long as you know it's streaming. — Rachel Kushner

Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you. — Rachel Kushner

He said, 'They're only whores,' as though their very availability rendered them worthless. — Ellen 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

I don't think a woman riding a motorcycle thinks of herself as doing something that has sex appeal. I think she's trying to replicate for herself an experience that she sees men having. — Rachel Kushner

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews. — Harold S. Kushner

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political. — Rachel Kushner

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer. — Rachel Kushner

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

Peter Kaplan was a giant. — Jared Kushner

Have you seen Marcus?" he asked his ugly friend.
"Yes, he was stoping some people in the Violet Room from climbing the curtains."
"What for?"
"They were not professionals."
"Oh. — Ellen Kushner

Current cant equates fantasy with escapism, and current fashion would have it that fantasy is both easy to read and to write. It isn't. When it is done honestly, by a skillful writer, fantasy takes us far enough beyond our daily perceptions to open us to the essential realities beneath it. This is the true goal of all art. — Ellen Kushner

The Talmud, the compilation of discussions of Jewish Law which I have quoted earlier in this book, gives examples of bad prayers, improper prayers, which one should not utter. If a woman is pregnant, neither she nor her husband should pray, "May God grant that this child be a boy" (nor, for that matter, may they pray that it be a girl). The sex of the child is determined at conception, and God cannot be invoked to change it. Again, if a man sees a fire engine racing toward his neighborhood, he should not pray, "Please God, don't let the fire be in my house." Not only is it mean-spirited to pray that someone else's house burn instead of yours, but it is futile. A certain house is already on fire; the most sincere or articulate of prayers will not affect the question of which house it is. — Harold S. Kushner

It is to this dimension of God, a God who cannot tolerate the reduction of a human being, fashioned in His image, to less than human status, that Job may be appealing. Job, in his extremity, is calling on God, saying, "I have no one left. I am without family. My friends have deserted me. You who are the Father of all humanity, is it not Your obligation to atone for my children's deaths as their go'el and to extract me from my current situation as my go'el?" Zophar — Harold S. 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

Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly. — Harold S. 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

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

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

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

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

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

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer. — Rachel Kushner

The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't make that contribution, nobody else can make it. — Harold S. Kushner

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse. — Rachel Kushner

Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly's feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn't have both. — Rachel Kushner

We pray to you, O God ... for strength, determination, and willpower, to do instead of just to pray, to become instead of merely to wish. — Harold S. 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

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

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book. — Rachel Kushner

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? — Harold S. Kushner

Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978. — Rachel Kushner

But, of course, we cannot choose. We can only try to cope. That is what one does with sorrow, with tragedy, with any misfortune. We do not try to explain it. We do not try to explain it. We do not justify it by telling ourselves that we somehow deserve it. We do not even accept it. We survive it. We recognize its unfairness and defiantly choose to go on living. — Harold S. Kushner

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way. — Rachel 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

Painting was a problem - you produce a thing, and then you sell it and get money, and that was quickly considered totally uncool. — Rachel Kushner

Real love isn't ever ambivalent, — Tony Kushner

Hold up your hands before your eyes. You are looking at the hands of God. — Lawrence Kushner

My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God. — Harold S. 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

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground. — Rachel 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

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not being an artist is I don't have to navigate the social hierarchies of the art world as a person of desire. I don't need anything. I live in a different way. — Rachel Kushner

(Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.") — Rachel Kushner

I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God "sends" illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. "What did I do to deserve this?" is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is "If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?" As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world. — Harold S. Kushner

We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us. — Harold S. Kushner

The goal is to do things that are exciting and respectable. — Jared Kushner

We have confused God with Santa Claus. And we believe that prayer means making a list of everything you don't have but want and trying to persuade God you deserve it. Now I'm sorry, that's not God, that's Santa Claus. — Harold S. Kushner

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours. — Rachel Kushner

I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global. — Rachel Kushner

Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was drawing in order to win. — Rachel Kushner

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me. — Rachel Kushner

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist. — Jared Kushner

Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place. — Rachel Kushner

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

Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs! — Rachel Kushner

Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people. — Harold S. 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

The VW doesn't make you think of Hitler and genocide. It's a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream. — Rachel Kushner

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers. — Rachel Kushner

From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and violence has been quite mythologized. — Rachel 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

We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be. — Harold S. Kushner

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion. — Ellen Kushner

Seek something outside your nine-to-five job as an additional source of fulfillment and as a way to feel the joy of helping others. — Harold S. 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

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak. — Rachel Kushner

People who pray for miracles usually don't get miracles. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayers answered. Their prayers help them tap hidden reserves of faith and courage that were not available to them before. — Harold S. Kushner

Think about it: it is easy to see God's beauty in a glorious sunset or in ocean waves crashing on a beach. But can you find the holiness in a struggle for life? — Harold S. 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

God does not send the problem; genetics, chance, and bad luck do that. And God cannot make the problem go away, no matter how many prayers and good deeds we offer. What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned. In — Harold S. Kushner

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't understand, where there are things you can't access simply by being intelligent or doing well in school. — Rachel Kushner

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter. — Harold S. Kushner

Our society puts too much emphasis on finding someone who will love you; our culture focuses too much on being loved and not enough on being a loving person. — Harold S. Kushner

When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative. — Harold S. Kushner

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor. — Rachel Kushner

In this day and age, much of journalism is about right or left, conservative or liberal, and 'The Observer' is just that: an observer. It is about truth. — Jared Kushner

Age is a convenient barometer of what a person is capable of, but it is only one. — Jared Kushner

For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it. — Rachel Kushner

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear ... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived. — Harold S. Kushner

I am interested in risk, in art as well as in the realm of politics. — Rachel Kushner

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

If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul — Harold S. Kushner

Reality, in a sense, was not an objective place where you were thrust. You had to maintain your hold on it by vigilantly keeping watch over whatever slight and intangible thing gave your life its meaning. Call it a soul, or presence. Whatever it was, a prisoner or guest and you had to trick it or petition it into lingering. — Rachel Kushner

Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched. — Harold S. Kushner

Publishing is not my world. — Rachel Kushner

Writing does produce a very unique satisfaction. There are times when I'm writing that it's frustrating or appalling or difficult, but when it goes well, it goes really well, and there is a feeling of rightness, like I'm doing the thing I was meant to do, almost in a mystical way, like I'm at an appropriate angle to the world. — Rachel Kushner

A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. — Rachel Kushner

The net promoter score of health insurers averages 4/100. Amazon is 74/100. — Joshua 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

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt. — Rachel Kushner

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

I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion. — Rachel Kushner