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

My father was dead by the time I became a writer, and he would have had a heart attack if he had read the first thing I wrote when it came out. My mother still keeps her copy of Faggots hidden away in a bottom drawer.

Larry [Kramer] and I often disagree. There was the whole meshuggaas we went through about his donating his papers to Yale, and I disagreed with him on a number of things about that. You wanted a gay center.

[Calvin Trillin] was very "shoe," which means he was a big jock, a big deal.

I just so desperately wanted to be published in New Yorker, and I'd so desperately try to get something in it. But I'd always get nice letters back telling me that Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987] just didn't like this or didn't like that about what I submitted.

The first time I remember our being socially in the same place was after we graduated and [author, investment counselor, philanthropist, and fellow 1950s Yalie] Peter Wolf had a party at his house in the Hamptons.

Larry [Kramer] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.