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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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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
Technology
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Traumatic
Film
Trance
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Print
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Television

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.
Tony Kushner
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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.
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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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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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.
Tony Kushner
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The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.
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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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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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 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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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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It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.
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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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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There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.
Tony Kushner