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

But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spe...

Tony Kushner

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

Tony Kushner

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 hav...

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.

Tony Kushner

I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York to go to Columbia, every time I went into the subway I was absolutely astounded because you see people from all over the world who actually live here...

Tony Kushner

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

Tony Kushner

The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways...

Tony Kushner

The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being.

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.

Tony Kushner

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

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.

Tony Kushner

If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you'...

Tony Kushner

I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.

Tony Kushner

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the ...

Tony Kushner

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

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