Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wasn't a [gay] activist, really.
I'm persona non grata at the New Yorker.
It's always been hard to be gay in Washington.
When one person mentors, two lives are changed.
Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.
There was a lot really awful about that time [in fifties] if you were gay.
[Calvin Trillin] was very "shoe," which means he was a big jock, a big deal.
I have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.
Everyone disappoints [Larry Kramer]. So it's not a problem for him either way.
I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.
[Larry Kramer] thinks Charles de Gaulle was gay. He thinks Max Schmeling was gay.
"Shoe" just meant you were a big jock on campus no matter what field you were in.
I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.
I never appear in any of your work, come to think of it, Calvin [Trillin]. And I look.
Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.
Tony Kushner has said that Larry [Kramer] thinks everyone always has to agree with him.
I was not "shoe." That's a misuse of the term "shoe," which is derived from "white shoe."
We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.
I don't think everybody's gay. But I think a lot more people are than the world knows about.
To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.
Some people say you have to be a Christian to be saved. I had to stop being Christian to be saved.
I could appear in this million-word book [Larry Kramer] are working on. Nobody would even notice me.
That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.
I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.
I believe we really became friends [with Larry Kramer] when we bonded at our fifteenth class reunion in 1972.
I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.
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.
One thing I learned in sobriety is to stop being judgmental, to always be discerning. When I drive, that will be my bumper sticker.
Larry [Kramer] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.
When I graduated [from Yale], I went back to Larry [Kramer]. But when I go to Yale reunions, there are still people who call me David.
I think I just felt a sadness at some points in my career that what is available to a straight writer is not available to a gay writer.
If there was criticism about [Oscar Wilde], it was because it was written by a straight man who wasn't very educated about the gay world.
"Weenie" was definitely a word we used at Yale back then. But I'm not sure you were one, Larry [Kramer]. Also, you were going by a different name.
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.
[Larry Kramer] said, when it was all about to fall through, "You betrayed me, Calvin." And I said, "I resent that. I was against you from the beginning."
I talked to [Larry] Kramer a little bit about it while I was writing 'Remembering Denny' . Denny was one of those people who took a long time to come out.
I was raped. That was a hard thing to write about. I never owned that part of it. Guys don't look at themselves as being raped. We're not raised that way.
I think it's a Jewish Yale custom. I wasn't aware that other people celebrated Christmas. My wife was very big on Christmas, and I was very big on my wife.
I had no administrative function at the New Yorker. I am what we used to call in construction back in Kansas City where I grew up "a dog-ass subcontractor."
David Remnick [the New Yorker's editor in chief]is about as interested in anything gay as I am interested in anything to do with baseball. It drives me nuts.
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.
[Calvin Trilllin] is not writing about things that I can criticize. I can call these other people out for what I think they are not doing. There's a big difference.
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?
[ John] Winthrop was the man who first said America was "a city upon a hill," which [Ronald] Reagan then appropriated. There are incidents like that all through history. We have been here.
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.
I don't like the vulgarity of Oscars weekend, but it's also sweet. It's prom weekend for anyone who didn't experience the real prom: the nerds, gay, arty outsiders. Hollywood is high school with money.
I was so unhappy as a child in Washington I figured if I'm going to Yale, I am going to start a new life. I'll change my name to my middle name. So I was known for my four years at Yale as David Kramer.
I find myself applying the addict's impulse to how I cruise. I don't look at the ass. If I see a hot guy walking towards me I look at his arm, and if he has a vein I fantasize about shooting up with him.
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.
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.