If you have value as an artist it’s probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you’re going to have.
It has always seemed to me that Barack Obama has studied intensely and learned a great deal from Lincoln.
I work best after the deadline has passed, when I’m in a panic.
I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.
I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man.
God knows I’ve had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.
Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction.
You have a strange relationship with calamity when you’re a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that’s a creepy thing to do.
I don’t write political plays in the sense that I’m writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say ‘Well, here’s the point.’
You’ll find, my friend, that what you love will take you places you never dreamed you’d go.
Here’s another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.
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.
I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.
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.
The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that ‘Lincoln’ is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we’ve actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln’s presidency that’s somewhat original.
I grew up in a small Southern town, and there were white people and black people. Coming to New York to go to Columbia, every time I went into the subway I was absolutely astounded because you see people from all over the world who actually live here – who aren’t just here as tourists.
In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.
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.
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.
I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I’m not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.