I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.

When I graduated [from Yale], I went back to Larry [Kramer]. But when I go to Yale reunions, there are still people who call me David.

It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.

If there was criticism about [Oscar Wilde], it was because it was written by a straight man who wasn't very educated about the gay world.

[Larry Kramer] got really mad at me once. The precipitating incident was a speech at Yale by the first President Bush's Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, against which Larry led a demonstration. He got the demonstrators to drown out Sullivan's speech, which wasn't allowed.