On the one hand, I'm grateful to be hired and thrilled to be paid.

Will this long presidency of George W. Bush ever be over? Living through it is starting to seem like some ghastly, upsetting novel in which the hero is the country, and the president is this disturbing, pig-headed, oblivious villain who makes things worse and worse and worse.

The first several scenes are about sexual addiction. They're not specifically political at all... I didn't sit down and think, ''I am going to write something about the religious right.'' I started out by writing something about sexual addiction, and it evolved... I don't look at a calendar and say: ''Oh! There's going to be an election in 1996. I think now, in 1993, I'll start writing a play that'll be ready for it.''

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.

Here is the key to existence. Are you listening? Here is the key to existence; when I tell you this you will know how to run your lives. You will know if you have been living life to the full, and if you realize you haven't been, you will know immediately how to correct that state of affairs. As soon as I tell you the key to existence. Are you ready? Are you ready for me to tell you?... Always breathe. That's the basis of life, breathing. That's basically the basis. If you don't breathe, you die.

I love actors. I enjoy their company, and I get excited each and every time they bring a character I've written to life. Every so often a talented actor doesn't hook in correctly to a character; or someone gets lost in a labyrinth of over-complicated thoughts, and the character and play suffer. However, most of the time I find actors either end up doing exactly what was in my head, or sometimes do something even better.