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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

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Broadway Remains The Closest

Tony Kushner

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

I Could Give You Absolutely Sterling Advice On How To Avoid Writing, How When You Run Out Of Things To Do Other Than Going To Your Desk And Writing, When Every Closet Is Reorganized And You've Called Your Oldest Living Relative Twice In One Day To See What She's Up To And There Isn't An Unanswered E-mail Left On Your Computer Or You Simply Can't Bear To Answer Another One And There Is No Dignity, Not A Drop Left, In Any Further Evasion Of The Task At Hand, Namely Writing, Well, You Can Always Ask Your Dentist For A Root Canal Or Have An Accident In The Bathtub Instead.

I Don't Want To Name Names Because They'd Be Mad At Me If I Did, But People Who Are Significant Novelists Can't Get Published By Real Publishers At This Point, Or Have To Go Through Two Years Of Trying After Writing A Novel That's Taken Them Five Or Six Years And Simply Can't Get The Thing In Print. Or It Gets In Print And It Doesn't Get Reviewed In The New York Times Book Review And Disappears Without A Trace. I Mean, It's Terrifying. I Don't Know How Anybody Can Stand It. It's Such An Enormous Amount Of Work And The Economics Of It Are Really Quite Brutal.

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.

When I Used To Teach Writing, What I Would Tell My Playwriting Students Is That While You're Writing Your Plays, You're Also Writing The Playwright. You're Developing Yourself As A Persona, As A Public Persona. It's Going To Be Partly Exposed Through The Writing Itself And Partly Created By All The Paraphernalia That Attaches Itself To Writing. But You Aren't Simply An Invisible Being Or Your Own Private Being At Work. You're Kind Of A Public Figure, As Well.

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.

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I Hate America. I Hate This Country. It’s Just Big Ideas, And Stories, And People Dying, And People Like You. 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. That Was Deliberate. Nothing On Earth Sounds Less Like Freedom To Me. You Come To Room 1013 Over At The Hospital, I'll Show You America. Terminal, Crazy And Mean. I Live In America, That’s Hard Enough, I Don’t Have To Love It. You Do That. Everybody’s Got To Love Something.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Body Is The Garden Of The Soul.

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In This World, There Is A Kind Of Painful Progress. Longing For What We've Left Behind, And Dreaming Ahead.

It's The Fear Of What Comes After The Doing That Makes The Doing Hard To Do.

I Love Reading; It's A Great Way To Avoid Writing.

If You [c]annot Find Your [h]eart's Desire In Your Own Backyard, You Never Lost It To Begin With

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gay Tv Has Been Immensely Important In Transforming American Culture In A More Gay-positive Direction.

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.

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.

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.

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