List of Tony Kushner Quotes

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.

Constitutional Democracy Has Created Astonishing And Apparently Irreversible Social Progress. All We're Interested In Is Talking About When Government Doesn't Work.

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.

If You're A Playwright, Unless You're Really Lacking In Get-up-and-go, You Can Always Get Your Play Up Somewhere. You Can't Necessarily Make A Living Doing It, But Theater Is About Meeting An Audience. Plays Are Not Easier To Write Necessarily, They Take Less Time To Write. If You Get Them Up, It's A Much More Rough-and-tumble Kind Of Existence. I Think It's, From My Perspective, Easier Than Novel Writing.

There Are Certainly People For Whom Politics Is Not A Category That Helps You Understand Human Existence. In Fact, It's Kind Of A Detour Into Superficiality, And Although I Disagree With Those People, I Don't Think It's The Case That Everyone Who Writes Has To Write Politically Or Has To Write In Opposition To The Really Horrendous Things That Are Going On On A Political Level In The World Today. There Are Some Writers Who Simply Aren't Any Good At That And Really Should Stay Away From It.

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.

I Love Musicals But It's Very, Very Different. It's Really Just A Different Form Than Serious Drama, And Has Very Different Rules And A Completely Different Set Of Characters And Requirements And Ambitions. It Maybe Shouldn't Be As Separate As It Is, But It's Got A Different History. In Terms Of Serious Drama, I Think You'd Have To Say That You Could Break It Down Essentially Into The Narrative Realist Tradition And Experimental Theater.

Plays Can Outlast Even The Opinions Of The Chief Film Critic Of The New York Times And That Reviews, Although They Feel Devastating In The Immediate Moment, Are Not Remotely As Significant As The Significance You Endow Them With On The Day That They Appear.

I Think That When You're Writing Plays, And I Think It's Also True With Novels, It Helps To Have An Ear For The Music Of Language, For What We Call Poetry, For The Sound Effects And The Way That The Sound Can Produce Sensual Feeling At Odds With Or Consonant With The Content Of The Work. Your Work Is Also Gorgeous Writing. It's Very Unfortunate When You Open A Novel That Everybody's Loving And It's Just, You Know, An Excruciatingly Bad Sentence.

Being On A Film Set Is Like Being In Tech Forever. In Theater, When You Finally Finish Rehearsing, You Go Onstage And You Do The Lights And The Sets And You Make The Machine Of The Production Work. It Takes Usually About Ten Days In The Theater, Two Or Three Weeks If It's A Really Big Musical. I Mean, It's Hell On Earth. You Just Sit Around Forever While They Adjust The Lights. And Every Playwright With Half A Brain Runs For The Hills When Tech Starts Because It's So Boring, And You Don't Want To Talk To The Director Because The Director Is Running This Giant Machine.

I'm In An Odd Place Right Now In New York Where I Routinely Get Trashed By Every Daily Drama Critic And Have A Few Allies Among Weekly/monthly Drama Critics, And You Sort Of Plot These Things Out And Figure It Out. But It's Just What Any Writer Goes Through, Periods Of Favor, Periods Of Disfavor. And The Trick Is Just To Keep Writing And To Not Let An Obsession.

One Is Told That You're Either A Hot Writer, Or You're Finished And You're Over. But Of Course, The More You Hang Around And The More You Become Aware Not Only Of What "reputation" Is For Other Writers, But Also What Your Own Reputation Is, You Become Aware That It's Much More Complicated Than The Conventional Media Would Have You Believe.