If you know that life is basically going to be horrendously difficult, at best, and all but unlivable at worst, or possibly even unlivable, do you go on? And the choice to go on is the only thing that I think can be called hope. Because if hope isn't forced to encounter the worst possibility, then it's a lie.

The way that same-sex marriage should reach the federal level is that it absolutely should be decided by the Supreme Court as quickly as possible. It's a 14th Amendment issue. There's no argument about it.

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Making movies is a very different experience in a lot of ways. It's difficult when you're used to owning the copyright and having a landlord's possessory rights - I rent my plays to the companies that do them and, if I'm upset, I can pull the play. But the only two directors I've worked with are pretty great.

As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

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.

Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

I don't feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I'm a gay man.

Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

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.