Armistead Maupin Quotes

I know I can't tell you what it's like to be gay. But I can tell you what it's not. It's not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity.

Then they would both dissolve in giggles, bowing in their mirth to the awful hopelessness of it all.

Her Mao tse-tung t-shirt was stretched so tightly across her chest that the Chairman was grinning broadly

Life goes on, sport.

Well ... not exactly together. He'd buy a sofa and I'd buy a couple of matching chairs. One has to plan on divorce at all times ... still, it was a landmark of sorts. I'd never gotten to the furniture-buying stage before.

The bay was bright blue today, the hard fierce blue of a gas flame. If there was fog rolling in - and there must be, given the insistence of those horns - she couldn't see it from here.

He should have made a checklist for every step of this transformational journey to radical self-expression.

Still, I gave her a call, wondering if she might have lost someone herself, but our talk was limited to the surreal events we'd just watched on television. A crisis does draw people together, but rarely for the right reason. The old wounds flare up again soon enough; the bond lasts no longer than the terror.

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.

Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun.

Queers doing cowboy dancing. Who would've thunk it? Kids who grew up in Galveston and Tucson and Modesto, performing the folk dances of their homeland finally, finally with the partner of their choice.

And this was what bothered him about owning a VCR. If that cowboy was yours for the taking - yours at the flip of a switch - what was to stop you from abandoning human contact altogether? He

Men and women, both straight and gay, who don't consider sexuality in measuring the worth of another human being. These aren't radicals or weirdos, Mama. They are shop clerks and bankers and little old ladies and people who nod and smile to you when you meet them on the bus. Their attitude is neither patronizing nor pitying. And their message is so simple: Yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me too.

The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live.

For the most part, I have a very manageable celebrity. People recognize me from time to time, and they usually say very appreciative things. It affords me a great deal of pleasure.

The hell of it is, I know the answer. The answer is that you never, ever, rely on another person for your peace of mind. If you do, you're screwed but good. Not right away, maybe, but sooner or later. You have to
I don't know
you have to learn to live with yourself. You have to learn to turn back your own sheets and set a table for one without feeling pathetic. You have to be strong and confident and pleased with yourself and never give the slightest impression that you can't hack it without that certain goddamn someone. You have to fake the hell out of it.

Mona ... lots of things are more binding than sex. They last longer too.

Could you conjugate that? To sleaze. I sleaze. You sleaze. We all have sleazen.

Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on."
The older woman poured herself a glass of sangria. "Screw that," she said quietly.
"What?"
"Screw that. Wash your mouth out. Who taught you that half-assed existential drivel?

She was Anna Madrigal, a self-made woman, and there was no one else in the world exactly like her.

My mother once told me that if a married couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love in the first year, and takes a penny out every time after that, they'll never get all the pennies out of the pot.

I don't see myself very clearly.
Then look at the people who love you ... Look into their eyes and see what they're seeing; that's all you need to know yourself.

Umbed by disappointment and betrayal, like a child who had been awakened suddenly from a summer dream about christmas morning.

Michael's generation - its history of fighting disease and bigotry - sometimes made him grumpier than Ben would like him to be, but he knew what he'd found in Michael: a gift for intimacy like none Ben had ever known.

What about San Francisco?"
"What about it?"
"Did you like it?"
She shrugged. "It was O.K."
"Just O.K.?"
She laughed. "Good God!"
"What?"
"You're all alike here."
"How so?" he asked.
"You demand adoration for the place. You're not happy until everybody swears undying love for every nook and cranny of every precious damn
"
"Whoa, missy."
"Well, it's true. Can't you just worship it on your own? Do I have to sign an affadavit?"
He chuckled. "We're that bad, are we?"
"You bet your ass you are.

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Things speed up as you circle the drain.
Armistead Maupin on ageing

Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation. You could make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy.

Laugh all you want and cry all you want and whistle at pretty men in the street and to hell with anybody who thinks you're a damned fool!

Solitude was no reason for sloppiness

The line, Lasko. Do you know anyone in San Francisco? Are you just gonna get off the train and take a streetcar to the swimming pool?" "I might. I could." "You have to have a plan, Lasko." "No, I don't. Not after this. I don't have to have a plan in the world.

Outing is a nasty word for telling the truth.

Look," said Mary Ann evenly, "if I think you're really attractive, there must be plenty of men in this town who feel the same way."
"Yeah," said Michael ruefully. "Size queens."
"Oh, don't be silly!" Sometimes Michael was sensitive about the dumbest things. He's at least five nine, thought Mary Ann. That's tall enough for anybody.

If she ever had a child, she would want him to grow up in San Francisco, where Mardi Gras was celebrated at least five times a year.

The rules of a well-ordered life were never enough when other people refused to obey them.

If you're going to be degenerate, you might as well be a lady about it, don't you think?

I think a lot of gay people who are not dealing with their homosexuality get into right- wing politics.

I couldn't write - or wouldn't write, at any rate - unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands

Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City)

Too much of a good thing is wonderful.

Needing and loving are two different things.

Pete thinks we all have a blacking factory: some awful moment, early on, when we surrender our childish hearts as surely as we lose our baby teeth.

I've always drawn on bits and pieces of my own life.

THERE WERE MORNINGS WHEN VINCENT FELT LIKE THE last hippie in the world. The Last Hippie. The phrase assumed a kind of tragic grandeur as he stood in the bathroom of his Oak Street flat, fluffing his amber mane to conceal his missing ear. If

She lifted the book to her nose and inhaled the scent lingering in its cardboard bones: a hint of rosewater and Lysol that instantly genie-summoned the Blue Moon Lodge. It was Winnemucca condensed, this book, the only thing she owned that could still predictably take her from here to there.

It's time to get mad, Michael. Niceness doesn't count for shit!

A half-hour conversation with Binky was like eating a Whitman Sampler in one sitting.

A pristine landscape was perfection itself; it was only when you added people that everything changed.

There is no fifth destination.

It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself.

There, as usual, she found her husband asleep in the flickering light of MTV. She knelt by the sofa and laid her hand gently on his chest. "Hey," she whispered. "Who's it gonna be? Me or Pat Benatar?" He stirred, rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of his forefinger. "Well?" she prodded. "I'm thinking.

She told me about the cop. And the movie star, and the construction worker. You're not having a life Michael, you're fucking the Village People one at a time

I want to deceive him just long enough to make him want me..

But I'm acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in today's world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers.

Being gay has taught me tolerance, compassion and humility. It has shown me limitless possibilities of living. It has given me people whose passion and kindness and sensitivity have provided a constant source of strength. It has brought me into the family of man, Mama, and I like it here.

I know that when Terry and I were together, 10 years ago, he did not appreciate it when people would ask him what it is like being partnered with a celebrity. Precisely because it suggested that he had no value.

It took so long to find you ... and now I don't want it to change. I want it all set in amber. I want us and nobody else in the most selfish way you can imagine. I can't help it
I'm old-fashioned. I believe marriage is between a man and a man.

It occurred to Michael that this was the great perk of being loved: someone to wait for you, someone to tell you that it will get easier up ahead. Even when it might not be true.

Somepeople drink to foregt, I smoke to remember Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City ...

I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time.

The menu at the Hug Deli included, among other items, the Warm and Fuzzy Hug, the Beverly Hills Air Kiss Hug, and the Gangsta Hug, with side orders of Pinch, Tickle, and Back Scratch. She ordered the Long Uncomfortable Hug, because she thought that was funny, thereby prompting a nut-brown Venice Beach-looking dude to hold on to her, earnestly pokerfaced, for a seeming eternity.
"Are you uncomfortable yet?"
"Fairly, yes."
"Excellent. My work here is done."
She laughed and mounted on her bike, pedalling away from the zany mirage as her gratuitous hugger shouted "Namaste" in her direction.

I consider myself much better adjusted than Gabriel.

The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.

Mona knocked at the wrong time.
"Uh ... yeah ... wait a minute, Mona
"
Mona shouted through the door. "Room service, gentlemen. Just pull the covers up."
Michael grinned at Jon. "My roommate. Brace yourself."
Seconds later, Mona burst through the doorway with a tray of coffee and croissants.
"Hi! I'm Nancy Drew! You must be the Hardy Boys!

I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.

Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave.
She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave.
"Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian.

My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don't make that mistake yourself. Life's too damn short.

Being in love is the only transcendent experience.

It was like school spirit back in high school. He didn't have it then, and he didn't have it now. To him, the biggest advantage of being queer was being queer.

Small world, huh?"
She grinned lewdly. "Not particularly. I'd say you've just run out of material.

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The hostess extended her swanlike neck and opened her mouth to the fullest. "Aaaahhhaaaahhhhheeeeaaaahhhh!"
Somewhere in the depths of the pine forest an identical sound reverberated.
"An echo!" exclaimed Frannie.
"No," smiled Helena. "Sybil Manigault. She's into nature.

When I get back from this book tour, I'm planning to learn the internet. Maybe I can hook up in cyberspace.