The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

The dreams of the left are always beautiful - the imagining of a better world, the damnation of the present one. This faith, this luminescent anger - these are worthy of being called human. These are the Beautiful that an age produces.

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.

There are certainly people for whom politics is not a category that helps you understand human existence. In fact, it's kind of a detour into superficiality, and although I disagree with those people, I don't think it's the case that everyone who writes has to write politically or has to write in opposition to the really horrendous things that are going on on a political level in the world today. There are some writers who simply aren't any good at that and really should stay away from it.

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

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

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.