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" Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around. "
Tony Kushner
Gets
Good
Criticism
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" 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
" There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater. "
Tony Kushner
Play
Which
Theater
" 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
" It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln. "
Tony Kushner
Great
Obama
Deal
" 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
" 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
" 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
" A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been. "
Tony Kushner
Been
Play
Mess
" 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. "
Tony Kushner
Writing
Know
People
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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 don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man. "
Tony Kushner
Finally
Fact
Feel
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories. "
Tony Kushner
Influence
Nashville
Me
" 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
" 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
Me
" 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