When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.

Tony Kushner

Categorized in : You Good Feel Self

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

Tony Kushner

wells actors people

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

Tony Kushner

progress dream world

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

fun people art

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.

Tony Kushner

spring two people

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

Tony Kushner

torture back-to-work writing

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.

Tony Kushner

naked wind people

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

waking-life theatre ideas

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

Tony Kushner

hard wisdom

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

debate believe thinking

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

ineptitude accomplishment artist

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

Tony Kushner

should-have play might

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.

Tony Kushner

love-is lying blood

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.

Tony Kushner

angels-in-america easy justice

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

Tony Kushner

ecology delicate delusion

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

Tony Kushner

possibility artist

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

revolution inspiration art

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Tony Kushner

historical writing character

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.

Tony Kushner

crazy hate country

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.

Tony Kushner

theatre literature america

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

Tony Kushner

optimism kind looks