I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.

When I was asked: "Will shame do it?" Meaning: Will welfare people be shamed into getting respectable work? And I said that shame plays the biggest role there is: The biggest shame is that there is so much abundance around but that so many have so little and so few have so much. That's the shame.

The people in Coming of Age were far less curmudgeonly than you would think. The greater percentage said that without the young we'd be lost. One woman, a former Southern belle, now 87, a philanthropist, says, "Well, these young, their history's been stolen from them. And what have we done to make them respect us?"

I cannot even picture myself retiring. What would I do? I'll always be doing something, asking somebody questions, even if there weren't a book.

One of the definitive works on gay life. Through this collective testimony we may come to understand what it is to be 'the other'; in short, the other part of ourselves.

The answer is to say 'No!' to authority when authority is wrong.

Last year I picked up the New York Times and there was a story about a kid from Dartmouth who was bragging that he never left his room, and made dates and ordered pizza with his computer. The piece de resistance of this story was that he had two roommates, and he was proud of the fact that he only talked to them by computer.