Tony Kushner

“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.”

“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.”

“Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching. Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.Harper: That's how people change.”

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

“I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free.It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and...Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.”

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

“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.”

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

“I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and, if I'm upset, I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.”

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

“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?”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”