When I was younger, I used to be very impatient with anyone who wasn't doing overtly political work. I've since come to feel that some writers have an appetite or a need for the political, for political discourse, for historical political subjects.

As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.

I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.