I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.

I rejected the word humorist for a long time because I thought that it meant you had, like, a cardigan sweater with patches on the elbows, but now I'm old and I do. I grew into that word. I think at heart, all this time, I've been a diarist. I'm not ashamed of it.

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection."

Most people, or at least most of the people that I've come into contact with, would like to be written about.

I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

It didn't seem fair to me that Jon Stewart's rally didn't get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck's did. Why was Beck's seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?

The good thing about being gay, though, I always believed, is that you didn't make anyone go to a wedding. Nobody wants to go to a wedding. Nobody. It kind of bothers me now that you have to go to gay weddings, too. I don't care. It's still a wedding. And I would give anybody double gifts if they would elope.