Tony Kushner quote: "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?"

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has...
TONY KUSHNER

You could argue that Barack Obama faced in '08 a situation as bad as any president since the Gre...
TONY KUSHNER

I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any carto...
TONY KUSHNER

But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. The first thing she did was M...
TONY KUSHNER

The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a...
TONY KUSHNER

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the f...
TONY KUSHNER

I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York...
TONY KUSHNER

But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresi...
TONY KUSHNER

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

I think I have a great deal of self-hatred, a profound feeling of fraudulence, of being detestable a...
TONY KUSHNER

Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms ...
TONY KUSHNER

The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decide...
TONY KUSHNER

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episo...
TONY KUSHNER

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzva...
TONY KUSHNER

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

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting...
TONY KUSHNER

I feel there's a power in theatre, but it's an indirect power. It's like the relationshi...
TONY KUSHNER

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

Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're us...
TONY KUSHNER

A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens...
TONY KUSHNER

The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we'v...
TONY KUSHNER

[Some of his characters were underdeveloped, to the extent that their speeches could be (and sometim...
TONY KUSHNER

If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, ...
TONY KUSHNER

I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of...
TONY KUSHNER

The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln'...
TONY KUSHNER

You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind but it's not always kind...
TONY KUSHNER

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and co...
TONY KUSHNER

Belize: Hell or heaven?

[Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance]

Belize: Lik...
TONY KUSHNER

As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his...
TONY KUSHNER

You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights...
TONY KUSHNER

I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or ...
TONY KUSHNER

I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America&...
TONY KUSHNER

The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a p...
TONY KUSHNER

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

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.
TONY KUSHNER

Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on ...
TONY KUSHNER

In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The...
TONY KUSHNER

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

The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time w...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much a...
HAROLD KUSHNER

Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness.
HAROLD KUSHNER

I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk cal...
RACHEL KUSHNER

The only things that are really permanent are love, family, friendship, and that is a lesson. At the...
JARED KUSHNER

Death takes the good, too good to stay, And leaves the bad, too bad to take away
HAROLD KUSHNER

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
HAROLD KUSHNER

Some writers think that fiction is the space of great neutrality where all humans share the same con...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I think the art world heightens the intensity of desires for inclusion, and the humiliations of excl...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.
RACHEL KUSHNER

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I don't pay attention to auction prices. Nothing interests me less. One of the benefits of not b...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I was really inspired by these larger-than-life female artists like Lee Bontecou and Eva Hesse and Y...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Age is a convenient barometer of what a person is capable of, but it is only one.
JARED KUSHNER

My older brother, Jake, and I had a bohemian childhood. My parents are deeply unconventional people ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I'm hesitant to ever take on the crest of the veteran. So I don't know who I am to warn the ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

'The Observer's Very Short List' is another example of how the Observer Media Group offe...
JARED KUSHNER

The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters decidin...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are i...
RACHEL KUSHNER

My father's favorite movie was 'The Dirty Dozen.'
JARED KUSHNER

I suppose I am interested in women plus anonymity plus disappearance.
RACHEL KUSHNER

I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mock...
RACHEL KUSHNER

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the ver...
RACHEL KUSHNER

It's through engagement with the world, and not separation from it, that something with meaning ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reade...
RACHEL KUSHNER

You can't cover up a lot of other workplace sins by just having that proverbial foosball table. But ...
GARY KUSHNER

I don't write listening to music, and in a way it seems silly that any writer should have to exp...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as 'sweeping,'_ 'tende...
RACHEL KUSHNER

At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I'm a convalescent. The ideal place f...
RACHEL KUSHNER

People are hysterical about the death of newspapers, and I would say, 'They're not dying; th...
JARED KUSHNER

I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited....
RACHEL KUSHNER

I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Tone is somewhat totalising in that, once I locate it, it tells me what kind of syntax to use, what ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I'm drawn in some strangely natural way to immersing myself in a milieu whose rules I don't ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Most consumer advocates recommend, for a cable company, you want to call once every six months and n...
AVIYA KUSHNER

Sometimes they'll say, 'No, this is only for new customers,' but sometimes there's some bargaining r...
AVIYA KUSHNER

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.
RACHEL KUSHNER

It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of hom...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I love the novels of Didion and Bret Ellis and consider them L.A. writers because they write about L...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.
RACHEL KUSHNER

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as ha...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I know what it's like to go very fast on motorcycles. Those moments, they stay with you.
RACHEL KUSHNER

I know a little bit about motorcycles and motorcycle riding.
RACHEL KUSHNER

A prophet is not a man who tells the future; he is a man who tells the truth.
HAROLD KUSHNER

The major Jewish dietary laws rest on a single premise: Eating meat is a moral compromise. There is ...
HAROLD KUSHNER

When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something in...
HAROLD KUSHNER

The ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to live fully, brave...
HAROLD KUSHNER

Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness
HAROLD KUSHNER

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. Th...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I always thought, 'Will I go into the business, or will I not go into the business?' But whe...
JARED KUSHNER

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on he...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Citizenship and ethnicity can become, in certain contexts, restrictive, and perhaps that's one r...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Proust is a huge author for me.
RACHEL KUSHNER

I like Baudelaire's sentences quite a lot. I read and re-read him very often.
RACHEL KUSHNER

I don't think a woman riding a motorcycle thinks of herself as doing something that has sex appe...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and...
RACHEL KUSHNER

Peter Kaplan was a giant.
JARED KUSHNER

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to ...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I got all my politics and culture and my sense of the great wide world of adults from 'Mad Magaz...
RACHEL KUSHNER

One is sometimes meant to reassure the reader that she's qualified to write about a certain topi...
RACHEL KUSHNER

From 'Midnight Cowboy' to 'Taxi Driver' is a brief era whose grit, beauty, and viole...
RACHEL KUSHNER

The first day he came in and sang on 'Set Me Free,' we were like, 'OK, this is the guy.' That's why ...
DAVE KUSHNER

It was pretty brutal. The process sucked.
DAVE KUSHNER

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing e...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really impor...
RACHEL KUSHNER

I had a Stuart Davis poster growing up.
RACHEL KUSHNER

Artists complain about the art world until it starts rubbing their back, then they have their love a...
RACHEL KUSHNER

When you think of the coordination this took, it's historic. When you think of the measures that wil...
HARVEY KUSHNER

No one will leave Safer America or saferamerica.com without a significant amount of training into wh...
HARVEY KUSHNER

When you close six embassies in a region in the world, you send a message to the world that not only...
HARVEY KUSHNER

New York is the capital of the world. If you want to hit a symbol, you hit New York. It's also the c...
HARVEY KUSHNER

If I can do things as an employer to make the work interesting, to make it a 'we work hard/we play h...
GARY KUSHNER

It's not even necessarily so much that happy employees are good for business. It is, from [Rich Ande...
GARY KUSHNER

I had decided that it is the fate of my generation never to have known the noble law of the sea, and...
RACHEL KUSHNER

She was drunk, as everyone was, most of the time.
RACHEL KUSHNER

To reduce the chances of crime in your home, put a deadbolt in your door, put a peephole in your doo...
MALCOLM KUSHNER

Comic vision often leads to serious solutions.
MALCOLM KUSHNER

A sense of humor means looking at things from an offbeat angle.
MALCOLM KUSHNER

Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect chan...
RACHEL KUSHNER

You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to ...
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted--a paved road or a washing machine? If...
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

I no longer ask the young man's question: How far will I go? My questions are now those of the matur...
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power. Those rewards create almost as many pro...
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have bee...
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

If you have been brave enough to love, and somtimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have care...
HAROLD S. KUSHNER

I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come...
RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

If that were God's plan, it's a bad bargain; I don't want to have to deal with a God like that...My ...
HAROLD S. KUSHNER

If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life ...
~RABBI HAROLD KUSHNER

I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come...
RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER

In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into ...
RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER

The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't ...
RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER

Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course.
RABBI HAROLD S. KUSHNER

Sinatra invited me once to his birthday party in L.A. I was young, and I felt great about it. But wh...
TONY BENNETT

A real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken a new action. If there's no action...
TONY ROBBINS

The reason my kids like McDonald's is that they always know what they're going to get. It...
TONY DUNGY

People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals - that is, goals that do not inspire them.
TONY ROBBINS

As an engineer, you learn there is a solution to every problem. It may take you a while, but eventua...
TONY CARDENAS

Be a doer and not a critic.
TONY BLAIR

It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
TONY ROBBINS

It sounds so simple, but if you just be yourself, you're different than anyone else.
TONY BENNETT

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.
TONY ROBBINS

How am I going to live today in order to create the tomorrow I'm committed to?
TONY ROBBINS

There's always a way - if you're committed.
TONY ROBBINS

Live with passion!
TONY ROBBINS

For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.
TONY ROBBINS

I love chocolate, and I love ice cream. That's a double whammy there. I constantly have to check...
TONY CARDENAS

The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.
TONY ROBBINS

Age does take it out of you, and I haven't the energy I had before. Sometimes I have breakfast a...
TONY BENN

My view is that you still, in order to win from the Labour perspective, have to have a strong allian...
TONY BLAIR

If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they ...
TONY ROBBINS

The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body The more efficient your body, the better ...
TONY ROBBINS

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to ...
TONY ROBBINS

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.
TONY ROBBINS

For me, I've never talked about my private life. It's always been about Black Sabbath. It...
TONY IOMMI

My faith foundation works to bring about a greater respect and understanding between different faith...
TONY BLAIR

For instance, I always have one hanging in Budapest in the mayors office.
TONY CURTIS

If I was called back to 'Grand Budapest 2,' a prequel or whatever, I'm there. I'm th...
TONY REVOLORI

The business of peace requires more than showing up with paint brushes, foodstuffs and an oil pipeli...
TONY SNOW

Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.
TONY BENN

At school, we'd studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my ...
TONY BRADMAN

There was a time when watching a cartoon was a nurturing experience. You would watch a Warner Bros. ...
TONY DANZA

I am all for cracking down on inappropriate digital behaviour. Too often the connected world is an e...
TONY PARSONS

Families represent the basic building blocks of our society, and primary care a foundational piece o...
TONY TAN

A buoyant, positive approach to the game is as basic as a sound swing.
TONY LEMA

The studio are making a lot of good noises about 'Bunker Hill;' so it would be great if that...
TONY CURRAN

I've been a member of the Labour Party sixty five years, and I remain in it, but I think it'...
TONY BENN

All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who...
TONY ABBOTT

For most of the Latinos in our nation, merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable would mean one c...
TONY CARDENAS

We all get so caught up in the moment of what we're doing every day, it's hard to hit that r...
TONY STEWART

I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when...
TONY HILLERMAN

To succeed you need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspir...
TONY DORSETT

I thought that I held the record of most appearances on the Bob Hope Show, but I think - It's Br...
TONY RANDALL

If we boost productivity, we can improve economic growth.
TONY ABBOTT

I'm a born-again Christian, but that's not the coat that I wear. It's just how my heart&...
TONY VINCENT

Everything's not going to go perfect. You're going to have some losses that you're going...
TONY DUNGY

Every dressing room should have a few proper bottles of bubbly.
TONY VINCENT

Babies have millions of brain cells. They are like light bulbs waiting to be turned on. Don't wa...
TONY BUZAN

Religion, for better or for worse, has been politicized in blatant ways that have seldom been equale...
TONY CAMPOLO

The Marxist analysis has got nothing to do with what happened in Stalin's Russia: it's like ...
TONY BENN

Ask me my three priorities for Government, and I tell you: education, education and education.
TONY BLAIR

I knew there were all kinds of interesting things going on at Google, but now that I've seen the...
TONY FADELL

Because the perpetrators typically have little understanding as to why they are sexually assaulting ...
TONY MARTENS

Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling
TONY DELISO

Keep your best wishes, close to your heart and watch what happens
TONY DELISO

Your past is important, but it is not nearly as important to your present as the way you see your fu...
TONY CAMPOLO

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.
TONY BENN

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.
TONY BENN

I did not enter the labor Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr. Mori, Dr....
TONY BENN

Learning how to learn is life's most important skill.
TONY BUZAN

The best results are achieved by using the right amount of effort in the right place at the right ti...
TONY BUZAN

I believe Mrs. Thatcher's emphasis on enterprise was right.
TONY BLAIR

To succeed you need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire...
TONY DORSETT

Failure is not fatal; victory is not success.
TONY RICHARDSON

My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in th...
TONY MARTIN

I have a simple life. I mean, you just give me a drum roll, they announce my name, and I come out an...
TONY BENNETT

In selling as in medicine, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.
TONY ALESANDRA

It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangero...
TONY BENN

A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference ...
TONY BENN

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?

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Tony Kushner

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

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