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" 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
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches. "
Tony Kushner
Artists
Find
Work
" 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
" 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
" Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution. "
Tony Kushner
Politics
Patience
Art
" 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
" 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
" God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was. "
Tony Kushner
More
Who
Where
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
You
Trust
Art
" 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
" 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
" It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln. "
Tony Kushner
Great
Obama
Deal
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been. "
Tony Kushner
Been
Play
Mess
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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