Quotes by Tony Kushner

About Tony Kushner:

Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. He co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film Munich, and he wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film Lincoln, both critically acclaimed movies. For his work, he received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.

Tony Kushner

I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.

Tony Kushner

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 membe...

Tony Kushner

I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.

Tony Kushner

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.

Tony Kushner

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 'Ang...

Tony Kushner

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

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

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

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

Tony Kushner

The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets.

Tony Kushner

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.

Tony Kushner

Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.

Tony Kushner

Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.

Tony Kushner

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

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

I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.

Tony Kushner

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

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

My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over 'Perestroika.' It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to 'Lincoln.'

Tony Kushner

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

Author Bio

  • NameTony Kushner
  • DescriptionAmerican playwright and screenwriter
  • AliasesAnthony Robert Kushner; Tony Kushner
  • BornJuly 16, 1956
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Screenwriter; Writer; Music Educator
  • AwardsPulitzer Prize For Drama; Lambda Literary Award; Primetime Emmy Award