Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.

That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.

[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.

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.

My father always wanted me to be president of the United States, and his fallback position was that I not become a ward of the county. I think my father was okay about my going into journalism, though.

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.

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.