Some people say you have to be a Christian to be saved. I had to stop being Christian to be saved.

I find myself applying the addict's impulse to how I cruise. I don't look at the ass. If I see a hot guy walking towards me I look at his arm, and if he has a vein I fantasize about shooting up with him.

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.

[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.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

[Larry Kramer] said, when it was all about to fall through, "You betrayed me, Calvin." And I said, "I resent that. I was against you from the beginning."

[ 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.