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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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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
Normal
Larry
Works
Uncle
Policy
Uncles
Modern
Toms
Zola
History
Handful
Kramer
Social
Impact
Cabin
Two
Drama
Cabins
Heart
Direct
Dickens

More quotes by 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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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.
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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It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
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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I love reading it's a great way to avoid writing.
Tony Kushner
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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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Nothing's lost forever.
Tony Kushner
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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.
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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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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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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A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.
Tony Kushner
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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.
Tony Kushner
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If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with
Tony Kushner