Tony Kushner Quotes

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

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.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

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.

Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.

Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

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.

One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

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?

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.

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.

I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word 'free' to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I'll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.

When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

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.

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.