Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
People
Failing
Probity
Dreams
Utopian
Expression
Fond
Politics
Progressive
Moral
Purity
Future
Ethics
Dream
Fail
Thing
Constantly

More quotes by Tony Kushner

Image
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
Image
I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.
Tony Kushner
Image
Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
Theatre for a New Audience is one of America's most admirable and exciting theatre companites...some of the best acted and directed work to be found on American stages, engaging with the canon of world dramatic literature in a vigorous way.
Tony Kushner
Image
As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.
Tony Kushner
Image
The theater requires an essential gullibility that you can't get through life without having. If all you can feel is skepticism-well , you meet people like this. Run away from them. They're not good people.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
In the modern era, it isn't enough to write, you must also be the Writer, with a capital 'W,' and play your part as the protagonist in the cautionary narrative in which you will fail or triumph, be in or out, hot or cold, ride the wheel of fortune.
Tony Kushner
Image
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
Image
The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.
Tony Kushner