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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

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But I Still Read

Tony Kushner

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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.

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It Has Always Seemed To Me That Barack Obama Has Studied Intensely And Learned A Great Deal From Lincoln.

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I Don't Feel, Finally, That My Politics Are Entirely Determined By The Fact That I'm A Gay Man.

My Whole Life Has Conspired To Bring Me To This Place, And I Can’t Despise My Whole Life.

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.

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.

I Think I'll Always Be A Better Playwright Than A Pundit, But I Believe That Writers Should Be Public Intellectuals And That Theater, Even More Than Film, Is A Place Of Public Debate.

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.

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?

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.

You Learn That Existence Is Legible But That You Have To Have A Critical Mind If You're Going To Read It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Film And Television

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Wish You Would Be More True To Your Demographic Profile. Life Is Confusing Enough.

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.

You Don't Go To The Movies To Do Historical Research, Unless It's Historical Research About The Movies.

Historical Research

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.

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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.

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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.

Respect The Delicate Ecology Of Your Delusions.

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Justice Precedes Beauty. Without Justice, Beauty Is Impossible, An Obscenity. And When Beauty Has Gone, What Does A Cameraman Do With His Eye?

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.

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Torture Yourself About Your Failures. And Then Get Back To Work.

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Telling The Truth

I Tend To Be Sort Of Quiet And Shy And Awkward In Social Situations.

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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.

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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 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.

Being On A Film Set Is Like Being In Tech Forever. In Theater, When You Finally Finish Rehearsing, You Go Onstage And You Do The Lights And The Sets And You Make The Machine Of The Production Work. It Takes Usually About Ten Days In The Theater, Two Or Three Weeks If It's A Really Big Musical. I Mean, It's Hell On Earth. You Just Sit Around Forever While They Adjust The Lights. And Every Playwright With Half A Brain Runs For The Hills When Tech Starts Because It's So Boring, And You Don't Want To Talk To The Director Because The Director Is Running This Giant Machine.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing's Lost Forever.

There's A Kind Of A Fundamental Irresponsibility In Playwriting, And The Strength Of Playwriting Comes From That Irresponsibility.

The Work Of Artists Is To Find What's Humanly Possible - Possibility's Furthest Reaches.

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.

Artists Know That Diligence Counts As Much, If Not More, As Inspiration; In Art, As In Politics, Patience Counts As Much As Revolution.

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 Think That Everybody Who Writes Believes That Their Work Has Some Kind Of Use-value, For Someone, That There's Some Need For It, Some Person Or Group Of People Out There Has Demanded That These Words Come Into Being. I Think That You Do The Work For These People. You Hope That You Can Make A Living At It. Whatever Your Ambitions And Needs Are In That Regard, Your Only Real Requirement Is To Try And Dig As Deeply As You Can Dig To Make Sense Of The Meaning Of Human Existence.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I Don't Understand Why I'm Not Dead. When Your Heart Breaks, You Should Die

Angels In America

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.

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.

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.

I've Always Been Drawn To Writing Historical Characters. The Best Stories Are The Ones You Find In History.

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