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.

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

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

Tony Kushner has said that Larry [Kramer] thinks everyone always has to agree with him.

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.

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 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.