Tony Kushner: The dreams of the left are always beautiful

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

play writing people

Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.

Tony Kushner

theater criticism

So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.

Tony Kushner

obvious-things forever thinking

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

choices lying thinking

I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

Tony Kushner

likes religious

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

Tony Kushner

angels-in-america break heart

A play is never finished. You'll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament.

Tony Kushner

lasts play mean

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

historical fiction thinking

I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free. It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and... Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.

Tony Kushner

gone-away justice morning

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.

Tony Kushner

depressing imagination thinking

I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.

Tony Kushner

without-you happens world

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

Tony Kushner

what-you-love my-friends

What makes the voice pathetic is that it doesn't know what kind of people it's reaching. Us. No one hears it, except us. This Age wanted heroes. It got us instead: carefully constructed, but immobile. Subtle but, unfit to take up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient.

Tony Kushner

voice hero people

I've never seen a great actor do a major role that didn't cost a lot. They're sacrificial animals of a sort.

Tony Kushner

cost roles animal

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.

Tony Kushner

luxury writing lying

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

nashville influence stories

We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for.

Tony Kushner

progress rocks desire

In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.

Tony Kushner

internet enemy way

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales.

Tony Kushner

shapes decision littles

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

ridiculous fables gay

The dreams of the left are always beautiful - the imagining of a better world, the damnation of the present one. This faith, this luminescent anger - these are worthy of being called human. These are the Beautiful that an age produces.