M. Kushner Quotes

I'm not religious, but I like God and he likes me.

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

Is this politics? I suppose I am going to have to learn all about it, if I am to run Lord Ferris's household, and throw parties and all. Now...explain to me again just who hates who, and why?

Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children.

No good deed ever goes wasted.

Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy... may be the surest proof of all of God's reality.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

Real love isn't ever ambivalent.

I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.

I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.

Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.

I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with

Only a life of goodness and honesty leaves us feeling spiritually healthy and human.

People like Congress more than their health insurance companies.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Honest change? Honest? Has someone altered the definition of the word while my back was turned, or have you recently developed a sense of humor?

Utterly ingenious! Tiffany Trent has more fine invention at her fingertips than a roomful of magical Leonardos!

Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin together again for the first time.

Dream big. Find what makes you happy, and pursue it as you would food and warmth. You deserve it. And if you don’t, then do what it takes to become worthy of it.

In a city where most of the wealth is controlled by a small few, certain things are overlooked, particularly when it comes to the assertion of privilege.

Let the fairy tale begin on a winter's morning, then, with one drop of blood newly-fallen on the ivory snow: a drop as bright as a clear-cut ruby, red as a single spot of claret on the lace cuff.

Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition.

The God I believe in is not so fragile that you hurt Him by being angry at him, or so petty that He will hold it against you for being upset with Him.

The path to God is rarely a steady climb upward. We climb, we fall back, and we climb higher again.

We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.

There is a Jewish notion that holiness is found with other people. To understand what life really is, one has to share it.

History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win.

I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind.

The net promoter score of health insurers averages 4/100. Amazon is 74/100.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

People who experience themselves as authentic are also experiencing themselves as myth, but that's not the narrative they're going with.

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive, for the writer.

Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.