I don't think everybody's gay. But I think a lot more people are than the world knows about.

I think I just felt a sadness at some points in my career that what is available to a straight writer is not available to a gay writer.

[Larry Kramer] even wrote this angry letter to the president of Yale, and in it he said what he said to us, that he was so disappointed in his straight friends because of AIDS and everything. He wrote the letter around March. And in it he wrote, "I usually go to the Trillins for Christmas, but I just couldn't do it this year."

I was not "shoe." That's a misuse of the term "shoe," which is derived from "white shoe."

We don't like to say that [my wife was Jewish] because her mother was Jewish, which means she was Jewish. So don't imply that my wife was a shikse.

[ John] Winthrop was the man who first said America was "a city upon a hill," which [Ronald] Reagan then appropriated. There are incidents like that all through history. We have been here.

We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.