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

-Tony Kushner

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

You'll Find, My Friend,

Tony Kushner

...

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

Topic

My Friends

What You Love

Unions Are Susceptible To The Same Ills That Befall All Human Societies.

Unions

Humans

Human Society

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.

Jobs

Thinking

Things I Love

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.

Nashville

Stories

Influence

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.'

Uncles

Drama

Heart

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.

Writing

Thinking

Your Side

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.

Spring

Two

People

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

Optimism

Looks

Kind

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.

Thinking

Support

Doe

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

Dream

Progress

World

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

Eye

Justice

Doe

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.

Depressing

Thinking

Imagination

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.

Art

Fun

People

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?

Zebras

Moving

Orchids

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.

New York

Play

Film Critics

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

Criticism

Theater

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.

New York

Drama

Writing

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

Desire

Backyards

Lost

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

Wisdom

Hard

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.

Art

New York

Mean

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.

New York

White

People

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

Art

Inspiration

Revolution

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.

Writing

Thinking

Odds

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

My Friends

What You Love

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

Mind

Existence

Critical

I'm Happy That I Feel A Little Less Out Of Place In Filmmaking Than I Once Was - But It's Almost Impossible For A Playwright In The U.s. To Make A Living. You Can Have A Play, Like I Did With 'angels,' And It Still Generates Income For Me, But It's Not Enough For Me To Live On And Have Health Insurance.

Movie

Angel

Play

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.

Morning

Gone Away

Justice

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.

Believe

Media

Hot

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.

Thinking

Obvious Things

Forever

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.

Bye

Secret

Citizens

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.

Hurt

Writing

Scary

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.

Forever

Firsts

Film

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.

Political

Dimensions

Kind

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

Play

Actors

Week

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.

Thinking

Two

Musical

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.

Gay

Play

People

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

Fundamentals

Kind

Playwriting

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.

White

Anthem

Angels In America

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

Religious

Likes

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.

Artist

Past

Telling The Truth

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?

Artist

Accomplishment

Ineptitude

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.

Lying

Thinking

Choices

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.

Art

Thinking

Income

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.

Running

Writing

Hands

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

Reading

Writing

Way

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.

Country

Hate

Crazy

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.

Wish

Different

Poet

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.

Thinking

Giving

Guilty

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.

America

Theatre

Literature

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.

Wind

People

Naked

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

Gay

Men

Facts

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.

Confused

Love Is

Play

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.

Writing

Play

Triumph

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.

Religious

Feelings

Kind

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

Enemy

Way

Internet

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

World

Without You

Happens

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.

Heart

Trying

Hot

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

Artist

Needs

Kind

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

Confusing

Wish

Would Be

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

People

Actors

Wells

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.

Grieving

Forever

Might

The Body Is The Garden Of The Soul.

Garden

Soul

Body

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

Play

Way

Illusion

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.

Technology

Film And Television

Way

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.

Writing

Thinking

Play

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.

Mother

Country

Thinking

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

Artist

Possibility

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.

Beautiful

Dream

Age

A Play Is Never Finished. You'll Find Out How Much I Mean That When You Read My Last Will And Testament.

Mean

Play

Lasts

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.

Political

Historical

Needs

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.

Fun

Writing

Thinking

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.

Gay

Hands

Psychics

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.

Angel

America

Say Anything

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.

Believe

Thinking

Debate

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.

Writing

Play

People

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

Gay

Important

Culture

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.

Writing

Play

Students

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.

Dream

Believe

School

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

Heart

Angels In America

Break

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.

Running

People

Essentials

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.

Dream

Expression

People

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.

Writing

Artist

Creepy

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.

Rocks

Progress

Desire

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.

Numbers

People

Theatre

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.

Lying

Love Is

Blood

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

Despise

Whole Life

Whole

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.

Moving

Math

Somewhere Else

The Fear Of A Work Becoming Dated Is One Of The Most Effective Tools For Keeping People From Writing Political Work.

Writing

People

Political

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.'

Writing

Play

Political

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

Awkward

Shy

Quiet

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.

Growing Up

Reading

Kids

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

Animal

Roles

Cost

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.

Blood

Long

Secret

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.

Thinking

Law

People

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.

Justice

Easy

Angels In America

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

Deals

Barack

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.

Art

Hate

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.

Lying

Writing

Luxury

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.

Hero

Voice

People

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

Writing

Character

Historical

Respect The Delicate Ecology Of Your Delusions.

Delusion

Ecology

Delicate

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.

Brother

Husband

Writing

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.

Writing

Play

Doe

Nothing's Lost Forever.

Forever

Lost

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

Democracies Have

Government

Talking

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.

Book

People

Advice

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.

Writing

People

Ears

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.

Spiritual

Angel

Past

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.

Morning

Writing

America

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.

Ideas

Theatre

Waking Life

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.

Drama

Historical

Details

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.

Writing

Bars

Balls

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.

Gay

Fables

Ridiculous

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.

New York

Real

Book

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.

Running

Mean

Two

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.

Zero

Drama

Creativity

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.

Writing

Thinking

People

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

Historical

Research

Historical Research

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.

Decision

Shapes

Littles

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

Should Have

Play

Might

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.

Mean

Thinking

Play

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.

Drama

Ambition

Character

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.

Real

Believe

Ambition

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.'

Art

Thinking

Historical

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.

Love Is

People

Giving

Real Love Isn't Ever Ambivalent.

Real

Love Is

Angels In America

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

Panic

Deadline

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

Writing

Back To Work

Torture

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.

Jobs

Mean

Artist

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.

Kindness

Heart

Thinking

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

Sound

Noise

Computer

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.

Thinking

Historical

Fiction

You'll Find, My Friend,

Understanding the Quote: "you'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places..."

Lessons From the Quote

About Tony Kushner

Actionable Takeaways

Closing Thoughts