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

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.

I'm persona non grata at the New Yorker.

People who aren't addicts want to know why I became one. They ask whether I had a midlife crisis. I'm only speaking for myself now, but I've stopped asking why and how. It's all about surrender and acceptance. It doesn't matter why I am an addict.

Is it easier for you to have straight friends, Larry [Kramer], since you seem so often disappointed in your gay friends who can't live up to what you expect of them as gay people?

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

[Larry Kramer] even wrote this angry letter to the president of Yale, and in it he said what he said to us, that he was so disappointed in his straight friends because of AIDS and everything. He wrote the letter around March. And in it he wrote, "I usually go to the Trillins for Christmas, but I just couldn't do it this year."