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" I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man. "
Tony Kushner
Finally
Fact
Feel
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" I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York to go to Columbia, every time I went into the subway I was absolutely astounded because you see people from all over the world who actually live here - who aren't just here as tourists. "
Tony Kushner
You
Time
Live
" 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
Impact
Uncle
History
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Day
Book
You
" I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations. "
Tony Kushner
Social
Awkward
Quiet
" The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me. "
Tony Kushner
Noise
Impatience
Me
" I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic. "
Tony Kushner
After
Work
Panic
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Reach
Supreme Court
Argument
" One of the things I learned in 'Slavs!' is that it's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them. "
Tony Kushner
Economics
People
Gay
" There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility. "
Tony Kushner
Irresponsibility
Strength
Kind
" I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities. "
Tony Kushner
Writing
You
Failure
" I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not. "
Tony Kushner
Feel
I Feel
Kind
" A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been. "
Tony Kushner
Been
Play
Mess
" And 'Queer Eye' is fascinating. It has a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming quality. It's very bourgeois, of course, and much more about the liberation of the consumer than the liberation of the democratic citizen. "
Tony Kushner
Consumer
Eye
Citizen
" And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I'm concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater. "
Tony Kushner
Night
New York
Art
" You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies. "
Tony Kushner
Research
Movies
You
" 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
Me
Mother
" Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around. "
Tony Kushner
Gets
Good
Criticism
" I'm happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was - but it's almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with 'Angels,' and it still generates income for me, but it's not enough for me to live on and have health insurance. "
Tony Kushner
Happy
Health
Me
" The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate. "
Tony Kushner
Brother
Son
Writing
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Technology
Journalism
Television
" The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original. "
Tony Kushner
History
Thinking
Line
" Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and, if I'm upset, I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great. "
Tony Kushner
Play
Movies
Great
" There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater. "
Tony Kushner
Play
Which
Theater
" 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
Out
Over
Hardest
" 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
Value
See
Artist
" 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
Way
Accomplishment
Who
" 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
You
Down
Start
" 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
Life
Hope
Know
" So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing. "
Tony Kushner
Done
You
Say
" As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice. "
Tony Kushner
Changes
Hate
Movies