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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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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
Legible
Critical
Existence
Read
Learn
Going
Mind

More quotes by 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'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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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.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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Nothing's lost forever.
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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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.
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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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 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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God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.
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