When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

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

One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

I write everything with fountain pens. I don't know why. I've done it since I was bar mitzvahed. I was given a fountain pen, a Parker fountain pen, and I loved it, and I've never liked writing anything with pencils or ball-points.

I don't want to name names because they'd be mad at me if I did, but people who are significant novelists can't get published by real publishers at this point, or have to go through two years of trying after writing a novel that's taken them five or six years and simply can't get the thing in print. Or it gets in print and it doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and disappears without a trace. I mean, it's terrifying. I don't know how anybody can stand it. It's such an enormous amount of work and the economics of it are really quite brutal.

Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.

I'm a sort of political person, and I feel that there's a kind of ineradicably political dimension to theater, to all theater, whether it's overtly political or not.