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" 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. "

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" You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. "

Tony Kushner

Think

Hope

Guilty

" The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill. "

" Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here's my rule: Ask yourself, 'Did this thing happen?' If the answer is yes, then it's historical. Then ask, 'Did this thing happen precisely this way?' If the answer is yes, then it's history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it's historical drama. "

" 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? "

" Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution. "

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

" There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater. "

" 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

Feeling

Think

" You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do. "

" I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it. "

" I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being. "

" 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. "

" 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-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist. "

" I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it. "

" But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud. "

Tony Kushner

Play

Mother

" But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic. "

Tony Kushner

Love

Love Is

" The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law. "

" The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me. "

Tony Kushner

Noise

Impatience

" I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing. "

" I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations. "