3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner You don’t go to the movies to do historical research, unless it’s historical research about the movies.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.’
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner There’s a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
3 December 2020 Tony Kushner 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.
