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" 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
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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
" When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together. "
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" Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies. "
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" 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
" I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationship of the sleeper to the unconscious. You discover things you can't afford to countenance in waking life. You can forget them, remember them a day later or not have any idea what they are about. "
Tony Kushner
Relationship
Power
Day
" 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
" 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 way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater. "
Tony Kushner
Play
Which
Theater
" Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction. "
Tony Kushner
More
Gay
Direction
" 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
Me
" 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
" A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been. "
Tony Kushner
Been
Play
Mess
" 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
" It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln. "
Tony Kushner
Great
Obama
Deal
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Gay
Time
Talk
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
History
Yourself
Detail
" 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
" God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was. "
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More
Who
Where
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Relationship
Artist
Life
" 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 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. "
Tony Kushner
Friend
America
Day
" The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches. "
Tony Kushner
Artists
Find
Work
" I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points. "
Tony Kushner
Writing
Pen
Why
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Say
Love
Love Is
" I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations. "
Tony Kushner
Social
Awkward
Quiet
" I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.' "
Tony Kushner
Kind
Writing
Watch
" I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic. "
Tony Kushner
After
Work
Panic
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Angels
Die
Then
" I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man. "
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Finally
Fact
Feel
" 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