Tony Kushner quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Tony Kushner

Top Tony Kushner Quotes

Browse top 63 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Tony Kushner.

Favorite Tony Kushner Quotes

1. "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

2. "Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.Harper: That's how people change." ~ Tony Kushner

3. "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

4. "I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I'd look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don't really remember the story, or why the wrestling --just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is...a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I'm...It's me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It's not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God's. But you can't not lose." ~ Tony Kushner

5. "One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid... One wants... But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?" ~ Tony Kushner

6. "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." ~ Tony Kushner

7. "I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough." ~ Tony Kushner

8. "We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins." ~ Tony Kushner

9. "Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve." ~ Tony Kushner

10. "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 upthe burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but notsufficient." ~ Tony Kushner

11. "Here's another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library." ~ Tony Kushner

12. "I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me." ~ Tony Kushner

13. "The body is the garden of the soul." ~ Tony Kushner

14. "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

15. "Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity." ~ Tony Kushner

16. "Belize: 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." ~ Tony Kushner

17. "Harper: You, the one part ofthe real world I wasn't allergic to." ~ Tony Kushner

18. "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

19. "Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions." ~ Tony Kushner

20. "Fabulous. If you possess it, you don't need to ask what it is. When you attempt to delineate it, you move away from it. Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular oppressed subculture's most distinctive, invigorating features. What are the salient features of fabulousness? Irony. Tragic History. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The fabulous is not delineated by age or beauty. It is raw materials reworked into illusion. To be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, and physical insufficiencies. The fabulous is the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, the dislike, the other." ~ Tony Kushner

21. "The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate." ~ Tony Kushner

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

23. "Nothing's lost forever." ~ Tony Kushner

24. "If He ever did come back, if He ever dared to show His face, or his Glyph, or whatever in the Garden again— if after all this destruction, if after all the terrible days of this terrible century, He returned to see how much suffering His abandonment had created, if all He has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That's my only contribution to all this theology: sue the bastard for walking out. How dare He." ~ Tony Kushner

25. "If you meant to invite me, and let's proceed from that assumption, then you wanted a playwright, and I have to say what a strange choice, what with Gabriel blowing his trumpet and the Book of Revelation unfolding seal by seal and all; it's as if you'd been warned of years of calamity and famine ahead and in response you anxiously stuffed an after-dinner mint in your pocket." ~ Tony Kushner

26. "We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do." ~ Tony Kushner

27. "Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?" ~ Tony Kushner

28. "MATAMORE: I never fight with my love face on, I worry that it might get scratched." ~ Tony Kushner

29. "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

30. "I did my best Shirley Booth this morning, floppy slippers, housecoat, curlers, can of Little Friskies; "Come back, Little Sheba, come back..." To no avail. Le chat, elle ne reviendra jamais, jamais..." ~ Tony Kushner

31. "YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS." ~ Tony Kushner

32. "…if a thing can be said to be, to exist, then such is the nature of these expansive times that this thing which is must suffer to be touched. Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it's a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. And if you're thinking how awful these sentiments are, you are perfectly correct, these are awful times, but you must remember as well that this has always been the chiefest characteristic of the Present, to everyone living through it; always, throughout history, and so far as I can see for all the days and years to come until the sun and the stars fall down and the clocks have all ground themselves to expiry and the future has long long shaded away into Time Immemorial: the Present is always an awful place to be." ~ Tony Kushner

33. "The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches." ~ Tony Kushner

34. "You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies." ~ Tony Kushner

35. "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 spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic." ~ Tony Kushner

36. "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

37. "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're going to have." ~ Tony Kushner

38. "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

39. "The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me." ~ Tony Kushner

40. "But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was Mrs. Frank in 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' The second thing she did was a play about Freud called 'The Far Country.' She played a paralyzed woman in Vienna who goes to see Freud." ~ Tony Kushner

41. "A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been." ~ Tony Kushner

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

43. "Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction." ~ Tony Kushner

44. "God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was." ~ Tony Kushner

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

46. "I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing." ~ Tony Kushner

47. "I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic." ~ Tony Kushner

48. "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

49. "You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind to be gentle and soft, there's a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be." ~ Tony Kushner

50. "But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life." ~ Tony Kushner

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