91+ Tony Kushner Quotes about education, future, america - QUOTLR (2024)

Tony Kushner is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, which was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning television miniseries. Kushner is also well-known for his other works, including the musical Caroline, or Change and the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's Munich. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Tony Kushner on love, education, future.

Top 10 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.
2. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
3. 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.
4. Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.
5. Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?
6. Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.
10. One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.

Tony Kushner Short Quotes

• My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.
• It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
• The body is the garden of the soul.
• If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with
• Nothing's lost forever.
• In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.
• I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.
• I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.

Tony Kushner Quotes About Love

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

Real love isn't ever ambivalent. — Tony Kushner

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

One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in. — 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

I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world. — Tony Kushner

You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go. — Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes About America

Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way. — Tony Kushner

There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there's only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics. — Tony Kushner

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die — Tony Kushner

I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America. — 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

Tony Kushner Quotes About Writing

In the modern era, it isn't enough to write, you must also be the Writer, with a capital 'W,' and play your part as the protagonist in the cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold, ride the wheel of fortune. — Tony Kushner

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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

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

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

The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate. — Tony Kushner

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history. — Tony Kushner

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work. — Tony Kushner

Part of what makes for good writing is an ear for what we would call the poetical. Poetry itself is another thing and it seems to me to be the most difficult writing - that those people are the best writers and they lead the way for everyone else and their writing is frighteningly great. — Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Quotes About People

The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people. — Tony Kushner

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

People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively. — Tony Kushner

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

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

Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation. — 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

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

Here's the thing about politics: It's not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this. — Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and off-off Broadway as far as I'm concerned is in New York the pride of New York theater. — Tony Kushner

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A play is never finished. You'll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament. — 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

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

I don't know anything about making movies. I'd never been on a film set. I'm really kind of an idiot when it comes to figuring out where objects are in space. If they're both moving, I can't do the math. If you ever see me driving down a road, go somewhere else quickly. — 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

Before the boiling of blood and the searing of skin comes the secret catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable. — 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

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

Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. — Tony Kushner

I love musicals but it's very, very different. It's really just a different form than serious drama, and has very different rules and a completely different set of characters and requirements and ambitions. It maybe shouldn't be as separate as it is, but it's got a different history. In terms of serious drama, I think you'd have to say that you could break it down essentially into the narrative realist tradition and experimental theater. — Tony Kushner

You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it. — Tony Kushner

Film is like tech starts on the first day of filming and it never stops. There's never a moment when the audience comes in, you're just in tech forever, and I can't stand being on a film set. It's really tedious. — Tony Kushner

I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does. — Tony Kushner

I'm in an odd place right now in New York where I routinely get trashed by every daily drama critic and have a few allies among weekly/monthly drama critics, and you sort of plot these things out and figure it out. But it's just what any writer goes through, periods of favor, periods of disfavor. And the trick is just to keep writing and to not let an obsession. — Tony Kushner

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales. — Tony Kushner

There are two strains, I think, in American playwriting, of importance. One is traditional narrative realism, which is definitely my strain, and then the other great contribution is American musical theater, which is a whole other kettle of fish. — Tony Kushner

In a sense, I feel like the job of the artist at all times is essentially the same, which is simply to tell the truth. I mean, I'm nervous about any prescriptions for what a writer should or shouldn't do. — Tony Kushner

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 up the burden of the times. It happens. A whole generation of washouts. History says stand up, and we totter and collapse, weeping, moved, but not sufficient. — Tony Kushner

We can't just stop. We're not rocks-progress, migration, motion is... modernity. It's ANIMATE, it's what living things do. We desire. Even if all we desire is stillness, it's still desire for. — Tony Kushner

One is told that you're either a hot writer, or you're finished and you're over. But of course, the more you hang around and the more you become aware not only of what "reputation" is for other writers, but also what your own reputation is, you become aware that it's much more complicated than the conventional media would have you believe. — Tony Kushner

I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it's like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I'm losing. — 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 not a narrative realist. — Tony Kushner

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing. — 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. — Tony Kushner

I have kind of an almost religious feeling about poets. I usually refuse to meet them because I admire them so much. Except for Poe. — Tony Kushner

I've never seen a great actor do a major role that didn't cost a lot. They're sacrificial animals of a sort. — Tony Kushner

I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation. — Tony Kushner

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

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents. — Tony Kushner

You become a character in a meta-drama into which your own dramatizing has pitched you. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishments dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity. — Tony Kushner

If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie. — Tony Kushner

I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow. — Tony Kushner

I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that. — Tony Kushner

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

When I was younger, I used to be very impatient with anyone who wasn't doing overtly political work. I've since come to feel that some writers have an appetite or a need for the political, for political discourse, for historical political subjects. — Tony Kushner

I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence. — 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. — Tony Kushner

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

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

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work. — Tony Kushner

Plays can outlast even the opinions of the chief film critic of The New York Times and that reviews, although they feel devastating in the immediate moment, are not remotely as significant as the significance you endow them with on the day that they appear. — Tony Kushner

Life Lessons by Tony Kushner

1. Tony Kushner's work emphasizes the importance of empathy and understanding, and the need to recognize and challenge systems of oppression.
2. His plays often explore difficult topics such as racism, homophobia, and poverty, and demonstrate the power of art to create meaningful dialogue and social change.
3. Through Kushner's work, we can learn to recognize our own biases and strive to create a more equitable and just world.