Tony Kushner Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I could give you absolutely sterling advice on how to avoid writing, how when you run out of things to do other than going to your desk and writing, when every closet is reorganized and you've called your oldest living relative twice in one day to see what she's up to and there isn't an unanswered e-mail left on your computer or you simply can't bear to answer another one and there is no dignity, not a drop left, in any further evasion of the task at hand, namely writing, well, you can always ask your dentist for a root canal or have an accident in the bathtub instead.

  Tony Kushner

  Running, Writing, Hands

  "We Call That Failure Art" by Tony Kushner, www.newyorker.com. October 31, 2013.

• 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

  Brother, Husband, Writing

• Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Back To Work, Torture

• The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, People, Political

• I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Character, Historical

• You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Artist, Creepy

• I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.

  Tony Kushner

  Reading, Writing, Way

• I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

  Tony Kushner

  Hurt, Writing, Scary

• 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 don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Play, Political

  "Pulitzer-winning playwright talks gay marriage, Obama, new play". Interview With Chris Welch, www.cnn.com. June 15, 2009.

• 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

  Writing, Play, People

• 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 write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I’m not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Play, Doe

  Tony Kushner's Commencement Address at The School Of Visual Arts in New York City, New York, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 12, 2010.

• When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Your Side

  Interview with Andrea Bernstein, www.motherjones.com. July/August 1995.

• 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

• 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

  Writing, Bars, Balls

• 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

• Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.

  Tony Kushner

  Lying, Writing, Luxury

  "We Call That Failure Art" by Tony Kushner, www.newyorker.com. October 31, 2013.

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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