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" I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing. "
Tony Kushner
Reading
Way
Writing
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Writing
Friend
Good
" 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 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
Place
Believe
Better
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies. "
Tony Kushner
Same
Befall
Human
" I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations. "
Tony Kushner
Social
Awkward
Quiet
" You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies. "
Tony Kushner
Research
Movies
You
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Movies
Work
Words
" It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln. "
Tony Kushner
Great
Obama
Deal
" 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
" You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe. "
Tony Kushner
Bad
Depression
You
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Act
Law
Become
" 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
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Kind
Mean
Say
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around. "
Tony Kushner
Gets
Good
Criticism
" I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it's a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won't even be bothered by the opinions. I'll make my own mind up.' "
Tony Kushner
Good
Thinking
Art
" Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction. "
Tony Kushner
More
Gay
Direction
" If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure. "
Tony Kushner
You
World
Gay
" 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
You
New York
New
" 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
" As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people. "
Tony Kushner
People
Things
Well