There was a Yale even before Larry [Kramer] and I got there, and there were three designations of students: "white shoe," "brown shoe," and "black shoe." "White shoe" people were kind of the ur-preppies from high-class backgrounds. "Brown shoe" people were kind of the high school student-council presidents who were snatched up and brushed up a little bit to be sent out into the world. "Black shoe" people were beyond the pale. They were chemistry majors and things like that.

Calvin [Trillin] was much more of a mover and a shaker. That's all I'm saying. I was a "weenie." That was another term back then.

Everyone disappoints [Larry Kramer]. So it's not a problem for him either way.

[ 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.

I get rejections from the New Yorker. When I had to give a little talk to the people graduating from the MBA program at Columbia who were going into writing and filmmaking and everything, I said, "When I tried to think of what to say, the only subject I thought was appropriate for people doing what you're going to do is rejection." That's what it's all about.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

If someone had come up to me at Yale and asked me how many homosexuals there were in my class, I would have said I don't think there are any. There may have been a few who were shy with girls. You have to understand, this was the 1950s.