Tony Kushner

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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.
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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.
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.
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.
There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
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.
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 don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.
Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.
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.
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.

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