Fortune never seems so blind to any as to those on whom she bestows no favors.
Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.
When one person mentors, two lives are changed.
[Larry Kramer] got really mad at me once. The precipitating incident was a speech at Yale by the first President Bush's Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, against which Larry led a demonstration. He got the demonstrators to drown out Sullivan's speech, which wasn't allowed.
I wasn't a [gay] activist, really.
My father was dead by the time I became a writer, and he would have had a heart attack if he had read the first thing I wrote when it came out. My mother still keeps her copy of Faggots hidden away in a bottom drawer.
I just so desperately wanted to be published in New Yorker, and I'd so desperately try to get something in it. But I'd always get nice letters back telling me that Mr. Shawn [William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 to 1987] just didn't like this or didn't like that about what I submitted.
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
I like to take care of myself and know what foods I should be eating.
Everybody in the government with whom I emailed knew that I was using a personal email, and I have said it would have been a better choice to have had two separate email accounts. And I've also tried to not only take responsibility, because it was my decision, but to be as transparent as possible.
Be yourself-but don't be conspicuous.