Latest Tony Kushner Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Being on a film set is like being in tech forever. In theater, when you finally finish rehearsing, you go onstage and you do the lights and the sets and you make the machine of the production work. It takes usually about ten days in the theater, two or three weeks if it's a really big musical. I mean, it's hell on earth. You just sit around forever while they adjust the lights. And every playwright with half a brain runs for the hills when tech starts because it's so boring, and you don't want to talk to the director because the director is running this giant machine.

  Tony Kushner

  Running, Mean, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Film is like tech starts on the first day of filming and it never stops. There's never a moment when the audience comes in, you're just in tech forever, and I can't stand being on a film set. It's really tedious.

  Tony Kushner

  Forever, Firsts, Film

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Moving, Math, Somewhere Else

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Religious, Feelings, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Odds

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Part of what makes for good writing is an ear for what we would call the poetical. Poetry itself is another thing and it seems to me to be the most difficult writing - that those people are the best writers and they lead the way for everyone else and their writing is frighteningly great.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, People, Ears

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Thinking, Two, Musical

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.

  Tony Kushner

  Artist, Needs, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

  Tony Kushner

  Wish, Different, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I love musicals but it's very, very different. It's really just a different form than serious drama, and has very different rules and a completely different set of characters and requirements and ambitions. It maybe shouldn't be as separate as it is, but it's got a different history. In terms of serious drama, I think you'd have to say that you could break it down essentially into the narrative realist tradition and experimental theater.

  Tony Kushner

  Drama, Ambition, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are certainly people for whom politics is not a category that helps you understand human existence. In fact, it's kind of a detour into superficiality, and although I disagree with those people, I don't think it's the case that everyone who writes has to write politically or has to write in opposition to the really horrendous things that are going on on a political level in the world today. There are some writers who simply aren't any good at that and really should stay away from it.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think that everybody who writes believes that their work has some kind of use-value, for someone, that there's some need for it, some person or group of people out there has demanded that these words come into being. I think that you do the work for these people. You hope that you can make a living at it. Whatever your ambitions and needs are in that regard, your only real requirement is to try and dig as deeply as you can dig to make sense of the meaning of human existence.

  Tony Kushner

  Real, Believe, Ambition

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Real, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I was younger, I used to be very impatient with anyone who wasn't doing overtly political work. I've since come to feel that some writers have an appetite or a need for the political, for political discourse, for historical political subjects.

  Tony Kushner

  Political, Historical, Needs

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Morning, Writing, America

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.

  Tony Kushner

  Fun, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm in an odd place right now in New York where I routinely get trashed by every daily drama critic and have a few allies among weekly/monthly drama critics, and you sort of plot these things out and figure it out. But it's just what any writer goes through, periods of favor, periods of disfavor. And the trick is just to keep writing and to not let an obsession.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Drama, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Play, Students

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Plays can outlast even the opinions of the chief film critic of The New York Times and that reviews, although they feel devastating in the immediate moment, are not remotely as significant as the significance you endow them with on the day that they appear.

  Tony Kushner

  New York, Play, Film Critics

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• One is told that you're either a hot writer, or you're finished and you're over. But of course, the more you hang around and the more you become aware not only of what "reputation" is for other writers, but also what your own reputation is, you become aware that it's much more complicated than the conventional media would have you believe.

  Tony Kushner

  Believe, Media, Hot

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Writing, Play, Triumph

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• You become a character in a meta-drama into which your own dramatizing has pitched you. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishments dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity.

  Tony Kushner

  Zero, Drama, Creativity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In a sense, I feel like the job of the artist at all times is essentially the same, which is simply to tell the truth. I mean, I'm nervous about any prescriptions for what a writer should or shouldn't do.

  Tony Kushner

  Jobs, Mean, Artist

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

  Tony Kushner

  Jobs, Thinking, Things I Love

  "OSCARS Q&A: Tony Kushner". Interview with Mike Fleming Jr., deadline.com. December 16, 2012.