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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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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
Movies
Historical
Research
Unless

More quotes by 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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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.'
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.
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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I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.
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
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In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
Tony Kushner
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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.
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 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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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.
Tony Kushner
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It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
Tony Kushner
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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.
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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Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.
Tony Kushner
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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.'
Tony Kushner
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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?
Tony Kushner