Tony Kushner Quotes

A clear division between good and evil, right and wrong, would simplify everything, but life was rarely simple.

To me, most of life kind of lives in the grey and I don't just mean morally. I just mean kind of everything. If things were black and white it would be a lot clearer as to what to do all the time.

Life is not simple, and people can't be boxed into being either heroes or villains.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

[...] I've come to the conclusion that the artist can not justify life or come up with a cogent reason as to why life is meaningful, but the artist can provide you with a cold glass of water on a hot day.

People who commit monstrous crimes are not necessarily monsters. If they were, things would be easy. But they aren't and it is one of the experiences of life.

I purposefully try to make films in that grey area, where things are morally ambiguous. It's like life: good people do horrible things, and bad people do good things, and there's beauty in horror and horror in beauty.

The scientific method is nearly perfect for understanding the physical aspects of our life. But it is a radically limited viewfinder in its inability to offer values, morals and meanings that are at the center of our lives.

The side of fairytales I don't like is that they always have happy endings, that there's just good and evil, and things are perfect. But life is a little more complicated, and that's what I try to teach my kids.

People have their complexities. They have their heroic moments and their villainous moments, too.

One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.

As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.

A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things.

I've yet to meet a person in my life who doesn't have some moral ambiguity.

It's never black and white on 'Game of Thrones.' If you think it's black and white, you're watching it wrong.

As a child, I wondered often, 'Why are we? What is the meaning of life?' These questions made me realize that life is what has meaning - not just individual lives, but all of our lives.

If you can write someone off as a bad person, then it's easier, but when someone is also great and noble and generous and kind and funny and contradictory, it gets harder.

Great novels are maps of complication, leading nowhere in particular, taking stances only provisionally and obliquely, happy to be tangled and to lack as many answers as the people they seek to depict.

We are all somewhere or the other a little grey, not black and white. We have our imperfections.

Good or bad is what we tend to want to affix to people, but we're all complicated.

Everything's not black and white. We choose to make bad decisions or not. I wanted to explore that and shine a light on it. Chip is trying to be a better person and lead a better life. His methods are just super flawed.

Our errors and our controversies, in the sphere of morality, arise sometimes from looking on men as though they could be altogether bad, or altogether good.