make it intimate, and you've lost it

In this new video interview for The Nation, playwright Tony Kushner, who wrote Angels in America, discusses 'nuclear numbing', 'dissociative states', the 'greed' lying behind the anti-global warming lobby, and the particular challenge for an artist in writing about climate change:

It's difficult to approximate, the minute you've made it intimate, you've lost what it is. It's as hard to grasp it in a work of art as it is to let it settle into your consciousness and to keep it alive there and not throw yourself out the window. So I struggle with that a lot, because I feel that I've backed away from it as a thing that I write about, partly because I don't really know how to address it head on.