Moms Mabley said you have to say good things about the dead. I say, 'He's dead. Good.'

When my brother-in-law, BIll Clinton, was elected, he had gay friends. That was a coming out.

Once he became president, George [H.] Bush revealed a vein of Styrofoam and no matter how deep he tried to go, he always ended up bobbing on the surface. His inaugural speech was like being present at the death of language.

[On Nancy Reagan:] At one photo op press conference, she toured a crack house and decried how awful it was, yet one suspected that for our Drug Czarina it had something to do with a plaid couch.

As you can imagine I'm disappointed as anything that I was not selected to be the presidential running mate. And I find it continually appalling that it would be a radical thing to have a woman on the ticket.

I've always felt that a really good joke, a really good one-liner, is a really good line of poetry. It's imagistic, it's compact, there is a rhythm to it.

Each time we had a visiting writer, I asked what she thought of women and humor. By the end of the year, I had perfected my question and asked Adrienne Rich why there was so little written about women and humor. She looked at me right in the eye and said, 'You write it.' I took that as an order.