I'm Not Religious, But I Like God

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.

Constitutional Democracy Has Created Astonishing And Apparently Irreversible Social Progress. All We're Interested In Is Talking About When Government Doesn't Work.

I Love Musicals But It's Very, Very Different. It's Really Just A Different Form Than Serious Drama, And Has Very Different Rules And A Completely Different Set Of Characters And Requirements And Ambitions. It Maybe Shouldn't Be As Separate As It Is, But It's Got A Different History. In Terms Of Serious Drama, I Think You'd Have To Say That You Could Break It Down Essentially Into The Narrative Realist Tradition And Experimental Theater.

You Have To Have Hope. It's Irresponsible To Give False Hope, Which I Think A Lot Of Playwrights Are Guilty Of. But I Also Think It's Irresponsible To Simply Be A Nihilist, Which Quite A Lot Of Playwrights, Especially Playwrights Younger Than Me, Have Become Guilty Of.

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.