Literary Birthday – 16 July – Tony Kushner

Happy Birthday, Tony Kushner, born on 16 July 1956.

Tony Kushner Quotes

1. In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.
2. Here’s another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.
3. As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.
4. 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.
5. If you’re a playwright, unless you’re really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can’t necessarily make a living doing it, but theatre is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it’s a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it’s, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.
6. Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.
7. 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.
8. While you’re writing your plays, you’re also writing the playwright. You’re developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It’s going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren’t simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You’re kind of a public figure, as well.
9. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

Tony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America. Blending realism with fantasy and political commentary, the play is considered a modern classic and incorporates elements of slipstream fiction. Kushner has also enjoyed a distinguished career in film. He co-wrote the screenplay for Munich with Eric Roth and wrote the screenplays for Lincoln and The Fabelmans with Steven Spielberg. Each screenplay earned him an Academy Award nomination. One of the few writers to be nominated for an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award, Kushner received the National Medal of Arts in 2013. His work is celebrated for its rich characters, powerful dialogue, and exploration of politics, history, and the human condition. Click here for a list of his works.

Source for image of the author: The Laura Flanders Show, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tony_Kushner_-_Hollywood_and_Socialism_-_The_Laura_Flanders_Show_2.png

by Amanda Patterson
Looking for more authors’ birthdays? Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar