Tony Kushner Quotes

ANGEL: I I I I
Am the Bird of America, the Bald Eagle,
Continental Principality,
LUMEN PHOSPHOR FLUOR CANDLE!

Sorry wrong room. (Prior exits, goes to Belize.) PRIOR (Despairing): He's the Marlboro Man. BELIZE: Oooh, I wanna see.

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

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

I've always wondered ... what if it really was Him, and He decided I wasn't worth it?

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

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

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

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.

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

K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death.

In some ways [the Internet]'s definitely an enemy.

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

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

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

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

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

Roy: The immutable heart of what we are that bleeds through whatever we might become. All else is vanity.

You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.

Purple? Boy, what kind of a homosexual are you, anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color up there is mauve.

Real love isn't ever ambivalent,

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

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

MATAMORE: I never fight with my love face on,
I worry that it might get scratched.

Opium is the perfect drug for people who want to remain articulate while being completely trivial.

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

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

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

YOU HAVE TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS.

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

Children of the new morning, criminal minds. Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.

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

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

Nothing's lost forever.

My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can't despise my whole life.

You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.

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.

I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

The body is the garden of the soul.

The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

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

Harper: You, the one part of
the real world I wasn't allergic to.

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

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

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.

JOE: You said my wife. And I want to know, is she -
PRIOR: TALK TO HER YOURSELF, BULLWINKLE! WHAT DO I LOOK LIKE A MARRIAGE COUNSELOR?

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

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.

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.

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

There's a way in which 'The Illusion' is a play about the theater.

Seven characters are too many for a ten-minute play. It'll be twenty minutes long! Fuck it. One of them is dead and the others can all talk fast.

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

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

You're a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.

If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with

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.

PRIOR (An awestruck whisper): God almighty.
Very Steven Spielberg.