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.

David Remnick [the New Yorker's editor in chief]is about as interested in anything gay as I am interested in anything to do with baseball. It drives me nuts.

Sometimes if I am walking down the street and thinking about my panoply of God, Ganesha, Parvati [Ganesha's mother], I say "Lucifer," because he belongs in that panoply. I miss him. That's why I'm a theist.

I never appear in any of your work, come to think of it, Calvin [Trillin]. And I look.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

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

"Shoe" just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.