Top 96 Armistead Maupin Quotes
#1. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#2. Could you conjugate that? To sleaze. I sleaze. You sleaze. We all have sleazen.
Armistead Maupin
#4. A pristine landscape was perfection itself; it was only when you added people that everything changed.
Armistead Maupin
#5. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#6. Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun.
Armistead Maupin
#7. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#8. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#9. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#10. Then they would both dissolve in giggles, bowing in their mirth to the awful hopelessness of it all.
Armistead Maupin
#11. Umbed by disappointment and betrayal, like a child who had been awakened suddenly from a summer dream about christmas morning.
Armistead Maupin
#12. Her apartment seemed fussier than ever, as if the doilies and tassels had taken to breeding in their unguarded moments.
Armistead Maupin
#15. Garbage, you know, is very revealing.It beats the shit out of tarot cards.
Armistead Maupin
#16. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#17. Taureans are stubborn as hell. They never want to tell you what sign they are ... But underneath that tough Taurus hide beats the heart of a hopeless romantic.
Armistead Maupin
#18. I'm the age now that Rock was when he picked me up, so I can understand how he felt - how his fame limited his freedom. You get kinder as you go along.
Armistead Maupin
#19. I couldn't write - or wouldn't write, at any rate - unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands
Armistead Maupin
#20. Things speed up as you circle the drain.
Armistead Maupin on ageing
Armistead Maupin
#21. In a burst of hideous insight, DeDe realized the depth of her commitment to this marriage. She had just traded adultery for a cheeseburger and an order of french fries.
Armistead Maupin
#22. He should have made a checklist for every step of this transformational journey to radical self-expression.
Armistead Maupin
#23. I haven't lost faith in human nature and I haven't decided to be less compassionate to strangers.
Armistead Maupin
#24. If I had my way ... We would lock ourselves away from that madness out there ...
Armistead Maupin
#25. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#26. Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that I was a complete Hitchcock fanatic from age 9.
Armistead Maupin
#27. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#28. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#29. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#30. I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir.
Armistead Maupin
#32. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#33. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#34. I felt very close to God ... My friends say that's because I was always on my knees.
Armistead Maupin
#35. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#36. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#37. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#38. If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.
Armistead Maupin
#39. If you're going to be degenerate, you might as well be a lady about it, don't you think?
Armistead Maupin
#40. I've always believed you can get closer to the truth by pretending not to speak it.
Armistead Maupin
#41. 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
Armistead Maupin
#42. It all goes so fast, she thought. We dole out our lives in dinner parties and plane flights, and it's over before we know it. We lose everyone we love, if they don't lose us first, and every single thing we do is intended to distract us from that reality.
Armistead Maupin
#43. The rules of a well-ordered life were never enough when other people refused to obey them.
Armistead Maupin
#44. I'm not sure I even need a lover, male or female. Sometimes I think I'd settle for five good friends.
Armistead Maupin
#45. She was Anna Madrigal, a self-made woman, and there was no one else in the world exactly like her.
Armistead Maupin
#47. Actions have consequences. In actions have them. We set things in motion by what we don't do.
Armistead Maupin
#48. 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!
Armistead Maupin
#50. But I will say that the drugs are much more ferocious then they used to be. There are people wrecking their lives with addiction, which seems much more severe.
Armistead Maupin
#52. I think a lot of gay people who are not dealing with their homosexuality get into right- wing politics.
Armistead Maupin
#53. Brian's face turned pouty. "So you were just blowing smoke up my ass." Anna smiled dimly. "You may have been inhaling, dear, but I wasn't blowing.
Armistead Maupin
#54. The worst of times in San Francisco was still better than the best of times anywhere else.
Armistead Maupin
#55. Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City)
Armistead Maupin
#56. You cannot be loved by someone who doesn't want to know you.
Armistead Maupin
#57. My life is full of love; I designed it that way. I try to make my own experience about love and I look for kindness in others. That's the thing I value the most: it will get you through everything.
Armistead Maupin
#58. Mona ... lots of things are more binding than sex. They last longer too.
Armistead Maupin
#60. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#61. Her Mao tse-tung t-shirt was stretched so tightly across her chest that the Chairman was grinning broadly
Armistead Maupin
#62. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#63. We're gonna be ... I mean people like you and me ... we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.
Armistead Maupin
#64. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#65. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#66. But it's amazing how many people think that gay men should slink off into the shadows when it comes to having friendships with children.
Armistead Maupin
#67. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#68. The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.
Armistead Maupin
#69. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#70. I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.
Armistead Maupin
#72. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#73. Don't listen when they scoff
That you are too old and I am young,
For I am old enough to know better
And you are young enough not to care.
Armistead Maupin
#74. When I get back from this book tour, I'm planning to learn the internet. Maybe I can hook up in cyberspace.
Armistead Maupin
#75. All I know is this: If you and papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it is the light and the joy of my life.
Armistead Maupin
#76. It's time to get mad, Michael. Niceness doesn't count for shit!
Armistead Maupin
#77. Somepeople drink to foregt, I smoke to remember Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City ...
Armistead Maupin
#78. Such a suitable word, stroke. I'd heard it since childhood without fully understanding its meaning, but it sounded, even through a haze of sleep and dope, just like itself: abrupt and brutal and irreversible. A stroke of lightning, the stroke of midnight, the stroke of a pen.
Armistead Maupin
#79. How could I possibly NOT be disappointed by what I would find? Nothing had ever met my expectation, since nothing could compete with my doctoring imagination, my pathetic compulsion to make the world quanter, funnier, kinder, and more mysterious than it actually was.
Armistead Maupin
#80. The people beneath the pendulum were in their own orbits of bliss or grief, which Shawna did not want to invade. Instead she made her way upstairs, reading the inscriptions that caught her eye, moved by the sheer accumulation of loss. Grief-fiti. That's what it was.
Armistead Maupin
#82. I want to deceive him just long enough to make him want me..
Armistead Maupin
#85. A half-hour conversation with Binky was like eating a Whitman Sampler in one sitting.
Armistead Maupin
#86. Well ... everything gets old after a while. I personally get a little sick of wrecking my liver at The Lion for the privilege of tricking with some guy whose lover is in L.A. for the weekend.
Armistead Maupin
#87. 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
Armistead Maupin
#88. I've included these little jokes and mysteries in my writing for the amusement of readers.
Armistead Maupin
#89. Small world, huh?"
She grinned lewdly. "Not particularly. I'd say you've just run out of material.
Armistead Maupin
#90. I believe very firmly that gay people of every stripe and age should be role models for all children, and that means interacting with them.
Armistead Maupin
#91. 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?
Armistead Maupin
#94. 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
Armistead Maupin
#95. 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.
Armistead Maupin
#96. Uh ... you know, strict." "With occasional lapses into lacto and ovo, huh?" "Yes. Except on weekends and nights when I'm stoned. Then I'm a steako-lacto-ovo ... or maybe a porkchopo-lacto-ovo ...
Armistead Maupin
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