Tony Kushner Quotes

I don't write books inadvertently.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out, and you wait around to get some good ideas that maybe do come or don't come. Until eventually you get the voice and autonomy of the characters, the characters have personality, and they sort of pick up the weight and put it on their shoulders. That's when it becomes a little more fun.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.