Tony Kushner Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.”

“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.”

“I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.”

“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?”

“If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.”

“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.”

“Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.”

“I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.”

“As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.”