On Diversity: 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. So the sort of United Nations feeling of the whole city, which has been true of the city for at least all of this century, and to some degree for at least the last 150 years, is incredibly thrilling to me. On Personality: I don't think of the city as being coldhearted at all, I mean, if there is a New York personality that all New Yorkers share, I think some of its chief characteristics are loquaciousness and articulateness, eloquence, intelligence, a degree of belligerence and toughness, a sense of humor, and an S&M component. Everyone is proud to the degree for which they suffer by living here, and there's a sense that you have to have what it takes. On How The City Works: This city is an example of a fantastic and completely unworkable variety of cultures, and consciousnesses, and generational differences, and sexual preferential differences, all living together in one place and forming a peaceable kingdom, a workable government, a real democracy, and creating a city that is genuinely an exciting civic space. On The Theatricality Of New York: The place is completely artificial except for Central Park, which is of course artificial but disguises its artificiality, which makes it in a funny way not theatrical. The streets of New York are entirely man-made and unmistakably that, so you feel as though you're on some sort of presentation platform whenever you're out on the streets. I mean that's the thing about Hollywood sets of New York City -- they never really look like New York City, but in point of fact they are exactly the same thing as New York City itself, they are a construction meant to look like a construction. It's an artifice representing an artifice, because the city is entirely artificial and that is theatrical -- that one's surroundings are sort of real and in a certain sense not real because that which is artificial has about it the quality of an illusion. There's something very dreamlike about it and very paradoxical. For me, that paradox is the theatrical paradox, in that it's sort of real and not real at the same time, that it seems permanent and completely impermanent, that it's very apparent and on the surface, and also full of depths and hidden things and recesses and boxes.		Born in Manhattan, Kushner moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, as a young child. He returned to New York to attend Columbia University and has stayed ever since. The son of musicians, Kushner is an award-winning playwright known for his works concerning the AIDS crisis. In 1993 his play "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches" was a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner.