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. – 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.’ – Tony Kushner
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
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
You have to have hope. It’s irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it’s irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of. – 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. – Tony Kushner
A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been. – 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 ‘Angels in America.’ I’ve never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it. – 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
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 subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book. – Tony Kushner
The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that ‘Lincoln’ is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we’ve actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln’s presidency that’s somewhat original. – 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
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
I’m happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was – but it’s almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with ‘Angels,’ and it still generates income for me, but it’s not enough for me to live on and have health insurance. – 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. – Tony Kushner
Accuracy is paramount in every detail of a work of history. Here’s my rule: Ask yourself, ‘Did this thing happen?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s historical. Then ask, ‘Did this thing happen precisely this way?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s history; if the answer is no, not precisely this way, then it’s historical drama. – Tony Kushner
As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people. – Tony Kushner
There’s a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility. – Tony Kushner
The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It’s sort of the sound of impatience to me. – 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 members secure. – Tony Kushner
Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It’s difficult when you’re used to owning the copyright and having a landlord’s possessory rights – I rent my plays to the companies that do them and, if I’m upset, I can pull the play. But the only two directors I’ve worked with are pretty great. – Tony Kushner
I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man. – Tony Kushner
The work of artists is to find what’s humanly possible – possibility’s furthest reaches. – 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
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
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
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 – who aren’t just here as tourists. – Tony Kushner
I write everything with fountain pens. I don’t know why. I’ve done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I’ve never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points. – Tony Kushner
Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction. – Tony Kushner