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.'
Tony KushnerRead
You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writers often transform personal and communal struggles into art, which can be unsettling.
In this quote, Tony Kushner reflects on the complex relationship between writers and the subjects of calamity they encounter. He suggests that as artists, writers take traumatic experiences and turn them into objects of artistic expression, which raises ethical questions about the process of commodifying suffering and the emotional distance it creates.
Themes
WritingCalamityArtObjectificationCreativitySuffering
In practice
Example use cases
During a literary festival, discussing how personal trauma informs writing.
More from Tony Kushner
All quotes →Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.
Tony KushnerRead
I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die
Tony KushnerRead
In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.
Tony KushnerRead
The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it.
Tony KushnerRead
Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.
Tony KushnerRead
Similar quotes
The regrets in the theatre have always been the shows that you know ought to have worked but for one reason or another haven't.
Andrew Lloyd WebberRead
I'm going to be a superstar musician, kill myself, and go out in a flame of glory.
Kurt CobainRead
In many ways, writing is the act of saying 'I,' of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, 'Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.' It's an aggressive, even a hostile act.
Joan DidionRead
Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.
John CageRead
Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.
Lionel HamptonRead
There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I have heard the expression “trick of the light” applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illumination” .
Erin MorgensternRead