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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

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Film Is Like Tech

Tony Kushner

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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.

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There Are Certainly People For Whom Politics Is Not A Category That Helps You Understand Human Existence. In Fact, It's Kind Of A Detour Into Superficiality, And Although I Disagree With Those People, I Don't Think It's The Case That Everyone Who Writes Has To Write Politically Or Has To Write In Opposition To The Really Horrendous Things That Are Going On On A Political Level In The World Today. There Are Some Writers Who Simply Aren't Any Good At That And Really Should Stay Away From It.

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.

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.

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.

I'm Not Religious, But I Like God And He Likes Me.

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.

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.

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.

I've Never Seen A Great Actor Do A Major Role That Didn't Cost A Lot. They're Sacrificial Animals Of A Sort.

A Play Should Have Barely Been Rescued From The Mess It Might Just As Easily Have Been.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Theater Really Gets Damaged When There Is A Paucity Of Good Criticism Around.

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.

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.

You'll Find, My Friend, That What You Love Will Take You Places You Never Dreamed You'd Go.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.'

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.

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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.

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.

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

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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.

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

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Constitutional Democracy Has Created Astonishing And Apparently Irreversible Social Progress. All We're Interested In Is Talking About When Government Doesn't Work.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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God Knows I've Had Productions Where There Were Actors In My Plays Who Were Making More Money Per Week Than I Was.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm Not An Experimental Artist. I Have No Talent For That. I Need A Certain Kind Of Antecedent Form To Follow.

Respect The Delicate Ecology Of Your Delusions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Angels In America

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.

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

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.

The Body Is The Garden Of The Soul.

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.

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.

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.

Telling The Truth

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Angels In America

There's A Way In Which 'the Illusion' Is A Play About The Theater.

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.

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.

I Don't Know What Will Happen To Me Without You. Only You. Only You Love Me. Out Of Everyone In The World.

In Some Ways [the Internet]'s Definitely An Enemy.

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.

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