Tony Kushner Quotes

Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.

Once, when I was playing a nude scene in an indifferent play in New York, a critic wrote, 'Diana Rigg is built like a brick basilica with too few flying buttresses.' Do you think that's fair?

As rewarding as a good film role can be, there is just nothing like getting up on a stage and taking an audience for a ride.

My father assigned me to keep his scrapbooks. At first I was interested in reading only his rave notices, but I got interested in reading what the critics were saying about whether the play was good or not.

It's fatal to talk about acting. It sounds faintly ridiculous if you start analysing it.

Television has some lovely aspects to it - and some ghastly aspects - but the theater itself was a wonderful invention.

I just want people to focus on the performance.

I do my best creating on stage.

That shot might not have been as good as it might have been.

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I'm paid to tell elaborate lies.

The New York City Ballet is obviously speaking to a whole new generation and bringing it the same wonder and beauty that it brought previous generations.

I think the opera is one of the great cultural jewels of Los Angeles.

Acting is a mysterious process.

Theater is exciting because it is collaborative, but it is also exhausting for the same reason.

I love what I do, and I love the audience, and I love the fact that I get to do it, and I love, I love our craft very, very, much, and it's a noble craft. We have a responsibility to it, and to the audience, and to the playwright, and to the message. I won't ever care less.

I know one thing - if I didn't have TV and theatre and radio, the world would be a much more boring place.

I directed a piece of theater in Italy. We took nine fables from the town and we created a play.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.

When you do a really good play, the audience and the performers are looking into the same looking glass, the same microscope. And the specimen they are looking at is human life and that's why I do it, that's why I like it.

What's the point of doing a brilliant Hedda Gabler in my back garden if no one will ever see it?

As far as I'm concerned, an audience is an audience. Whether it's an audience in Hull or the National Theatre, that's who you play to. It's not money - it's good to get some, but that's not why I do it. You do it because you have to, to tell a story.

If I weren't an actor, I'd either be a teacher or a critic.

It doesn't matter what medium I perform, I just love to perform in general, if it's good work.

Performing, not rehearsing, is a dancer's raison d'etre, and I've been lucky to 'etre' in some extraordinary places - Cuba, Paris, Mongolia. In particular, a two-week stint in Greece leaps to mind. We danced in the Acropolis's Herodes Atticus amphitheater, once a venue for gladiator spectacles.