Top 100 Tony Kushner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it’s ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they’re attacking the center of your being.”

— Tony Kushner

54. “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

55. “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?”

— Tony Kushner

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

— Tony Kushner

57. “You don’t go to the movies to do historical research, unless it’s historical research about the movies.”

— Tony Kushner

58. “I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York to go to Columbia, every time I went into the subway I was absolutely astounded because you see people from all over the world who actually live here – who aren’t just here as tourists.”

— Tony Kushner

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

— Tony Kushner

60. “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

61. “Unions are susceptible to the same ills that befall all human societies.”

— Tony Kushner

62. “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

63. “Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?”

— Tony Kushner

64. “The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in ‘Nashville,’ transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.”

— Tony Kushner

65. “People shouldn’t trust artists and they shouldn’t trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.”

— Tony Kushner

66. “The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come.”

— Tony Kushner

67. “As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.”

— Tony Kushner

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “One of the things I learned in ‘Slavs!’ is that it’s much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them.”

— Tony Kushner

72. “Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.”

— Tony Kushner

73. “Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.”

— Tony Kushner

74. “A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.”

— Tony Kushner

75. “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

76. “Here’s another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.”

— Tony Kushner

77. “We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.”

— Tony Kushner

78. “The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we’ve become people like Woody Allen – thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.”

— Tony Kushner

79. “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

80. “It’s something you learn after your second theme party: It’s all been done before.”

— Tony Kushner

81. “I’m a sort of political person, and I feel that there’s a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it’s overtly political or not.”

— Tony Kushner

82. “The kind of theater that I do is sort of ‘narrative realism,’ which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori’s plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.”

— Tony Kushner

83. “One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can’t refuse to look at how horrible things are.”

— Tony Kushner

84. “So I think I’ll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it’s gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it’s not the production. It’s not the same thing.”

— Tony Kushner

85. “I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does.”

— Tony Kushner

86. “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

87. “That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision – the balancing of scales...”

— Tony Kushner

88. “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

89. “I’ve always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.”

— Tony Kushner

90. “Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don’t you think it’s depressing?”

— Tony Kushner

91. “Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.”

— Tony Kushner

92. “They got back the Senate but we have the courts. By the nineties the Supreme Court will be block-solid Republican appointees, and the federal bench – Republican judges like land mines, everywhere, everywhere they turn. Affirmative action? Take it to court. Boom! Land mine. And.”

— Tony Kushner

93. “I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man.”

— Tony Kushner

94. “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

95. “The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that ‘Lincoln’ is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we’ve actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln’s presidency that’s somewhat original.”

— Tony Kushner

96. “I’ve never seen a great actor do a major role that didn’t cost a lot. They’re sacrificial animals of a sort.”

— Tony Kushner

97. “God knows I’ve had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.”

— Tony Kushner

98. “It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.”

— Tony Kushner

99. “I think I’ll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.”

— Tony Kushner

100. “You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you’re going to read it.”

— Tony Kushner