Those people are seen, I assume, by Larry [Kramer] as writing partly about gay issues and problems, whether it's on the surface or not, and I am not. But another thing is when we met, there still wasn't exactly a gay/straight divide in the minds of a lot of straight people. There weren't any gay people, as far as we knew, at Yale.

I haven't had sex in two and a half years. A guy I met in San Francisco gave me a sympathy blow job. It didn't really work. I said, "You're just doing this 'cause you feel sorry for me." We stopped in the middle.

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

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

I'm sorry to keep focusing on the New Yorker, but everybody who was growing up when Calvin [Trillin] and I were growing up wanted to be published in the New Yorker.

I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.

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.