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A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

Tony Kushner

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Tony Kushner
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: July 16
Author
Music Pedagogue
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Anthony Robert Kushner
Anthony R. Kushner
Rescued
Barely
Mess
Easily
Might
Play

More quotes by Tony Kushner

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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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?
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner