A play is never finished. You'll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament.

I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick - one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called 'Angels in America.' I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it.

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.

It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.

If you're gay and you can't hold hands, or you're black and you can't catch a taxi, or you're a woman and you can't go into the park, you are aware there's a menace. That's costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.

The work of artists is to find what's humanly possible - possibility's furthest reaches.