Top 100 Tony Kushner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.”

— Tony Kushner

2. “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”

— Tony Kushner

3. “We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”

— Tony Kushner

4. “There are no gods here, no ghosts and spirits in America, there are no angels in America, no spiritual past, no racial past, there’s only the political, and the decoys and the ploys to maneuver around the inescapable battle of politics.”

— Tony Kushner

5. “Nothing’s lost forever.”

— Tony Kushner

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

— Tony Kushner

7. “The body is the garden of the soul.”

— Tony Kushner

8. “You’ll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you’d go.”

— Tony Kushner

9. “Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.”

— Tony Kushner

10. “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

11. “It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.”

— Tony Kushner

12. “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

13. “I never imagined losing my mind was going to be such hard work.”

— Tony Kushner

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

— Tony Kushner

15. “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

16. “I don’t think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you’re paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.”

— Tony Kushner

17. “You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it’s not always kind to be gentle and soft, there’s a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.”

— Tony Kushner

18. “I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.”

— Tony Kushner

19. “Before the boiling of blood and the searing of skin comes the secret catastrophe: Before Life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”

— Tony Kushner

20. “It’s the price of rootlessness. Motion sickness. The only cure: to keep moving.”

— Tony Kushner

21. “I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.”

— Tony Kushner

22. “I don’t understand why I’m not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die.”

— Tony Kushner

23. “I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.”

— Tony Kushner

24. “You do not live in America. No such place exists.”

— Tony Kushner

25. “A play is never finished. You’ll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament.”

— Tony Kushner

26. “And the dead will be commemorated and we’ll struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.”

— Tony Kushner

27. “The fountain of Bethesda will flow again. And I told him I would personally take him there to bathe. We will all bathe ourselves clean.”

— Tony Kushner

28. “Belize: I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. Nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying, and then people like you. The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word free to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.”

— Tony Kushner

29. “I try to tighten my heart into a knot, a snarl, I try to learn to live dead, just numb, but then I see someone I want, and it’s like a nail, like a hot spike right through my chest, and I know I’m losing.”

— Tony Kushner

30. “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.”

— Tony Kushner

31. “The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.”

— Tony Kushner

32. “I think, if you touch me, your hand might fall off or something. Worse things have happened to people who have touched me.”

— Tony Kushner

33. “My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.”

— Tony Kushner

34. “People are more easily manipulated when they don’t have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can’t act effectively.”

— Tony Kushner

35. “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

36. “You have to have hope. It’s irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it’s irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of.”

— Tony Kushner

37. “The dreams of the left are always beautiful – the imagining of a better world, the damnation of the present one. This faith, this luminescent anger – these are worthy of being called human. These are the Beautiful that an age produces.”

— Tony Kushner

38. “HARPER: I don’t understand why I’m not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die. But there’s still the rest of you.”

— Tony Kushner

39. “I’m not religious, but I like God and he likes me.”

— Tony Kushner

40. “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

41. “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

42. “There’s a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.”

— Tony Kushner

43. “There’s a way in which ‘The Illusion’ is a play about the theater.”

— Tony Kushner

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

— Tony Kushner

45. “Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.”

— Tony Kushner

46. “You can’t live in the world without an idea of the world, but it’s living that makes the ideas. You can’t wait for a theory, but you have to have a theory.”

— Tony Kushner

47. “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.”

— Tony Kushner

48. “The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It’s sort of the sound of impatience to me.”

— Tony Kushner

49. “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.”

— Tony Kushner

50. “Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.”

— Tony Kushner