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When Elaine asks Robert to account for how he came to experience unconditional love, was this meant to be a rhetorical?
After learning that her husband, Jeffrey, is thinking about killing her, she tries to account for her blindness to the menace and she wonders: "If only I had given more, had imposed fewer conditions on my love for Jeffrey, would I now be able to accept this, and would Jeffrey be capable of loving me without such murderous thoughts?" She is extending an awful lot of love toward Robert. If it's not unconditional, then close to it. And unconditional love is never appropriate in a marriage, in my view, except by parents for their children as they are growing, particularly in the early years.

What's wrong with unconditional love?
Husbands and wives and lovers and parents should all be loved conditionally; as whole people, as adults, our behavior should be subject to standards of behavior, whereby the withholding of love, in small or great measure, is not inappropriate: if one's mate lies and cheats, one is entitled to stop loving that person, or certainly to set "conditions" on one's love. My love is given on the condition that I am not persistently abused — physically, mentally, sexually and so forth. These are conditional forms of love. One does not stay married to a partner who tries to kill you or rape you.

How do you feel about monogamy?
Monogamy is neither good nor bad. It's a context, like sunny weather.

Jeffrey's genuinely interested in Robert's voice and script, yet defers to Hollywood's voodoo economics. Are limousine liberals ultimately worse than right-wingers?
To me it's less important to determine which is worse than to look for underlying causes shared by both. I don't find Jeff's attitude so much self-loathing as I do self-advancing (materialistically speaking). If the most important thing to you in life is the acquisition of more money and more things, then your choices are going to be informed by that, and a realistic assessment of what sells and what doesn't is quite useful.

Jeffrey is leading a double life as a married bisexual. He says, "You can do anything you want, as long as you don't call it what it is."
Secrecy — or the "right to privacy" — is one of the ways we encourage corruption and sexual abuse. By making sexuality "nobody else's business" (except, of course, if it's something you find offensive, therefore legislate-able and prosecutable), and incomes and private savings and tax returns into entirely private matters, then a large number of crimes and spiritual and physical abuses are made possible. The sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is one example of this. Our monumental ignorance about the basic reality of our position and our actions as a nation is the most dangerous and, in my view, the most deeply entrenched of the many symptoms of our predilection for privacy.

There's been a recent crackdown on pedophiles, with one innocent man committing suicide because of undue persecution.
I think any individual fourteen or older should be given the rights of consensual sex with people of any age. I am particularly opposed to legislating sexual contact between people of the same age who are minors. I was giving blowjobs at seven, I was having sex with adults that I initiated, and I don't regret this or think of it as a misstep or an emotionally or psychically damaging chapter in my life. Children are highly sexual, and they are perfectly capable, if raised sanely, in establishing their own boundaries with other children.

What do Lucas perennials like Mary-Louise Parker and Campbell Scott offer you as actors? Do you hear them as you write?
I don't hear them, no. But these artists are open to the undiscovered, the unknown, the surprise and freshness rather than the received wisdom or the worn formula. They also work by a certain aesthetic of withholding - less is more. They make you come to them rather than doing all the work for you. So much of modern, highly praised acting is overacting and/or a repetition of some earlier achievement.

Mary-Louise Parker was just nominated for a Tony for last winter's revival of Reckless. The play is, by turns, farcical and tragic. What drove you to write it?
Probably my abandonment at birth, but I proffer this reluctantly. Usually I tend to think those things are best left unsaid when it comes to experiencing a work of art: knowing the artist's life-material doesn't enhance the value of the art one bit, in my view. Would Shakespeare's plays be better if we knew more about him? I don't think so.

Mike Nichols is against the concept of "likeability of character." He makes the joke that today folks are apt to want their Lady Macbeth to be nicer — more of a role model.
Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer and the entire history of television are all plagued with this problem. Art is about exceptions, not the norm. It is as much about sinning as it is about the right path. Nothing human is foreign to great art. Americans are little concerned with great art at this point; we're so busy shooting up with distractions to keep from thinking about ourselves and about the actions of our government.

In Dying Gaul you probe identity not only through sexual intimacy, but also through chat rooms. If I recall, in Gaul you remark that instant messaging is like life after death. Where are we heading as such interactions become ubiquitous?
Computers are terribly isolating and they privilege the wealthy; they also bring great opportunities to vast numbers of people. Their effects will benefit large numbers of people and have deleterious effects we have yet to perceive. A tool is only as good as the use you put it to and your skill in using it. Technology is neither good or bad, in my view. It just is. It's people that are good and bad, or human actions, and that's where the jury is still out.  n°