I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.

In a wild and diverse democracy each of us should be trying to talk to lots and lots and lots of people outside of our own kind of comfort zone and community, and that injunction goes even further for political leaders. They should talk to everyone, they should listen to everyone, and at the end of the day they should have a mind of their own.

Injustice anywhere is an assault on all of us. That means that we all can get busy.

I wasn't part of John Kennedy's vision of the world, or Lyndon Johnson's. I thought of them as anti-Communist imperial monsters.

Even there, [Barack] Obama's generals, his Pentagon, they're telling him what to do. And the force for gay rights is inevitable. And you can say Obama will help us, and maybe he will, but only if we have something on the ground that will make him help us. Frankly, the gay movement on the ground has been one of the great propulsive things that has made politicians do what they do.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.