Kevin Sessums Quotes

When one person mentors, two lives are changed.

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

I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

I could appear in this million-word book [Larry Kramer] are working on. Nobody would even notice me.

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.

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] had already experienced so much loss by then from the AIDS epidemic. But I don't think it changed anything between us.

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

I'm persona non grata at the New Yorker.

I've done every other thing in life except intimacy. That's the aberration, the thing I've never had.

Calvin [Trillin] has never done anything majorly objectionable.

[ 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.

I have never heard that referred to before, that term: Jewish men from Yale.

We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends.

I was not "shoe." That's a misuse of the term "shoe," which is derived from "white shoe."

"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.

I believe we really became friends [with Larry Kramer] when we bonded at our fifteenth class reunion in 1972.

[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."

To some people, knowledge and science are everything. To me, God is everything I don't know.

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

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.

Hollywood needs peripheral people like me. You're not of that world, but you're needed.

I'm not denying Christ by not being Christian. I'm a theist, which involves expanding on the Christ narrative.

Some people say you have to be a Christian to be saved. I had to stop being Christian to be saved.

I am a theist. I live life between that "a" and the "t." It's a vast little space.

One thing I learned in sobriety is to stop being judgmental, to always be discerning. When I drive, that will be my bumper sticker.

[Calvin Trillin] was very "shoe," which means he was a big jock, a big deal.

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

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'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.

That's why I tried to kill myself when I was a student [in Yale]. I thought I was the only one there.

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.

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.

[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.