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.
Tony KushnerThe kind of theater that I do is sort of โnarrative realism,โ 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 KushnerI'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.
Tony KushnerI've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.
Tony KushnerOne has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can't refuse to look at how horrible things are.
Tony KushnerYou become a character in a meta-drama into which your own dramatizing has pitched you. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishments dismal; it's a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity.
Tony Kushner