M. Kushner Quotes
I don't quite see the 20th century as one of chaos. But I believe in certain inevitable outcomes of a materialist nature.
Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.
Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.
I didn't think of the narrative as making a judgment. It didn't occur to me the reader would either, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible there would be that risk.
I'm releasing myself from the responsibility of claiming to know when something is good and when it isn't.
I don't really have those kinds of intentions when I write a scene. I try to follow the internal logic of the fiction, rather than make an argument or an assertion.
My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.
I like to think each writer is doing his or her part. Feeding the lake, as Jean Rhys said. And maybe there are different lakes.
I think any time you deal with humans and the way they exploit one another and cause pain you are in the realm of politics, on some level.
In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.
Authenticity is too big a subject to just toss in with the question about the photographs!
Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.
The kids I knew growing up who worked on bikes all loved the smell of gas. It is the liquid agent for speed.
I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.
I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.
When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.
A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.
I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.
You have time. Meaning don't use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don't rush to meet it. Be a conduit.
People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.
My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.
L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.
It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.
I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.
The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.
I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.
You'll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you'd go.
A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'
I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.
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 act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.
I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.
I have kind of an almost religious feeling about poets. I usually refuse to meet them because I admire them so much. Except for Poe.
The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.
The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being.
I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.
It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.
God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.
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.
My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.
