Suddenly you're at church and you hear someone pray, "For gays and lesbians, that they might realize their [sins]...." That's happening less and less now, but all it takes is one of those when you're nine, ten, eleven, twelve - and it's hard to describe to people who aren't, because of course if you're not gay, an eleven- or twelve-year-old wouldn't even remember that that happened.

So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.

I guess we all feel like underdogs. I remember being a freshman at Brown University and not knowing what a WASP was. We were reading an Edward Albee play, and - it was just a moment of accepting, certainly that I wasn't very worldly, but also that a lot of the plays that I'd been reading, let's say other kinds of family plays, were speaking a foreign language.

I know how much respect I have for people of all different faiths, but especially for my family, who are the most important people in my life, and who are still practicing, and deeply religious.

Priests are very interested in theater in New York! It's this lovely reminder that priests are just people, too, who need to be entertained.

In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.

The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.