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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.

-Tony Kushner

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There Are Certainly People

Tony Kushner

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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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The Computer, The Noise Of The Computer Feels Like Impatience. It's Sort Of The Sound Of Impatience To Me.

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

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.

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.

Angels In America

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.

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.

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.

One Has To Have A Complicated Kind Of Optimism. You Can't Refuse To Look At How Horrible Things Are.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 Have Kind Of An Almost Religious Feeling About Poets. I Usually Refuse To Meet Them Because I Admire Them So Much. Except For Poe.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Go Into Any Movie That's Historical Fiction Thinking, 'ok, I'm Here To Watch A Work Of Art, Something Delivering A Series Of Opinions, And If It's A Good Work Of Art, These Opinions Become So Deeply Embedded In Complexity And Richness That I Won't Even Be Bothered By The Opinions. I'll Make My Own Mind Up.'

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 Write Political Plays In The Sense That I'm Writing Essays That Are Kind Of Disguised As Plays. I Would Really Defy Anyone To Watch Any Of My Plays And Say 'well, Here's The Point.'

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 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.

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.

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Historical Research

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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.

As A Playwright, You Are A Torturer Of Actors And Of The Audience As Well. You Inflict Things On People.

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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.

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

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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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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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

Real Love Isn't Ever Ambivalent.

Angels In America

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

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

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?

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'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 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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

Respect The Delicate Ecology Of Your Delusions.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I Work Best After The Deadline Has Passed, When I'm In A Panic.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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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