Top 88 Larry Kramer Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Larry Kramer

#1. I wasn't involved in anything. I wasn't out - you know, I know I wasn't in ACT UP. I wasn't with Larry Kramer. I wasn't by his side. I wasn't saying what I should do, because, by all accounts, I was a drug addict and an alcoholic. And I was living in a complete bubble of self-absorption.

Elton John

#2. A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'

Tony Kushner

#3. When would insight, knowledge, hope, and beauty meld?

Larry Kramer

#4. One should be able to have the man one loves.

Larry Kramer

#5. That Massachusetts Bay Colony had been set up in England as a corporation, enabling one hundred white male religious fanatics to elect their leader to rule in a completely totalitarian way.

Larry Kramer

#6. You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

Larry Kramer

#7. And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it? Mrs Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.

Larry Kramer

#8. There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.

Larry Kramer

#9. AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

Larry Kramer

#10. I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.

Larry Kramer

#11. I came from Yale, where you get an extracurricular degree in self-importance because you went there. When AIDS happened, I was treated like an outcast. And I don't like that feeling.

Larry Kramer

#12. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn't have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.

Larry Kramer

#13. I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

Larry Kramer

#14. Living with AIDS is like always having the sword of Damocles over your head. The disease is scarier than death itself. The disease is so messy, so devastating, so pervasive. It robs you of everything you hold dear.

Larry Kramer

#15. Of the 2,639,857 faggots in the New York city area, 2,639,857 think primarily with their cocks.
You didn't know that the cock was a thinking organ?
Well, by this time, you should know that it is.

Larry Kramer

#16. You do not get more with honey than with vinegar.

Larry Kramer

#17. All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who doesn't take drugs, and isn't on unemployment.

Larry Kramer

#18. Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.

Larry Kramer

#19. Saying someone is gay who is gay no longer constitutes defamation or slander or libel. You cannot defame someone by telling the truth.

Larry Kramer

#20. Don't lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.

Larry Kramer

#21. The warring conflict in man between the intellect and the libido shall never be twinned.

Larry Kramer

#22. Cock-a-doodle-do! Any cock will do!

Larry Kramer

#23. Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.

Larry Kramer

#24. Holy shit," somebody muttered in the dark.
"A virgin," sputtered another.
"I didn't know they still made them."
"He just did.

Larry Kramer

#25. Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are.

Larry Kramer

#26. We shouldn't have to be faithful, we should want to be faithful.

Larry Kramer

#27. I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words 'gay community.' Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community.

Larry Kramer

#28. This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

Larry Kramer

#29. We're all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.

Larry Kramer

#30. Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.

Larry Kramer

#31. And then he thought, profoundly, how there was something grand about living in hope, but also something terribly unreal and incomplete about it, because when you were hoping, you were not doing or living or experiencing the Now,

Larry Kramer

#32. By nature, I'm an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.

Larry Kramer

#33. Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.

Larry Kramer

#34. The True End of not only therapy but Maturity is to learn to live with the inescapable fact that 97% of all human beings are getting fucked and 97% of all faggots are, too.

Larry Kramer

#35. For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.

Larry Kramer

#36. Closets, schmosets, everyone's out of the closet. Now where the fuck are the men!

Larry Kramer

#37. When in doubt, eat donuts.

Larry Kramer

#38. Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.

Larry Kramer

#39. There are three roles one can play as a homosexual: one involving being the daddy to someone who is the son, another, therefore, being the sonny to that pop, the third involving looking for yourself in someone approximately identical to you.

Larry Kramer

#40. Indeed, to be fucked pleasurably is a gift.

Larry Kramer

#41. I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything.

Larry Kramer

#42. How to phrase it? Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella.

Larry Kramer

#43. You're the cure? I hope you come in a portable version, like a laptop. Can you find me a boyfriend while you're at it?

Larry Kramer

#44. Irwin F. Gellman's Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles,

Larry Kramer

#45. I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they're a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I'm gay.

Larry Kramer

#46. The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.

Larry Kramer

#47. The system will always be here. The system doesn't change.

Larry Kramer

#48. And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds. That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself Surely you see that.

Larry Kramer

#49. Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, 'Lets think of all the poor dead people' - or 'let's honor all the dead' instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader.

Larry Kramer

#50. Looking thirty, claiming forty, actually forty-five.

Larry Kramer

#51. The straight and narrow, so beloved of our founding fathers and all fathers thereafter, is now obviously and irrevocably bent. What is God trying to tell us ... ?

Larry Kramer

#52. And you can't do anything without God. God hates us, you know. That's why so many believe we have to love Him so much. What feeble goddamned pussies we are.

Larry Kramer

#53. Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.

Larry Kramer

#54. The only safe place left is the dark.

Larry Kramer

#55. AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.

Larry Kramer

#56. We're still leaderless. We still don't have strong organizations that are fighting for us; there isn't a national AIDS organization out there worth squat in my opinion.

Larry Kramer

#57. I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we're better than other people. I really do. I think we're smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.

Larry Kramer

#58. We were the generation psychoanalysts tried to change.

Larry Kramer

#59. It's happened before. It's all happened before. History is worth shit.

Larry Kramer

#60. The guys in New York don't know the new media. San Francisco takes more risks as a culture.

Larry Kramer

#61. We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.

Larry Kramer

#62. Straights don't compare themselves to us!

Larry Kramer

#63. I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

Larry Kramer

#64. I think being gay and gay people are the most wonderful things in the world. I wish all of us could have the power and pride to benefit from what is rightfully ours. Why isn't there an enormous building in Washington called the 'National Association of Lesbian and Gay Concerns' to lobby for us?

Larry Kramer

#65. The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.

Larry Kramer

#66. We have created our own aesthetic!"
"You mean our own Ghetto.

Larry Kramer

#67. Have you any idea how long a ten-inch cock is?

Larry Kramer

#68. We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

Larry Kramer

#69. How needy man is.

Larry Kramer

#70. A penis has never been something that you pick up and put down and put away idly without consideration.

Larry Kramer

#71. The tyranny of the blood test.

Larry Kramer

#72. I gave you books. You gave me plants. Books live. Plants die.

Larry Kramer

#73. The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America.

Larry Kramer

#74. Well, kid, I have seen the future and it shits.

Larry Kramer

#75. I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.

Larry Kramer

#76. I...I...I...want...your...other...arm!

Larry Kramer

#77. There's no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?

Larry Kramer

#78. Have you listened to your heart?

Larry Kramer

#79. Humiliation is so essential to Catholics. And to faggots!

Larry Kramer

#80. It's the oldest story in the world. You want him back, don't you?

Larry Kramer

#81. If Fred's history will seem less unbiased then some would wish, let it never be overlooked that it is no small task to record a history of hate when one is among the hated.

Larry Kramer

#82. Like the deepest secrets in a psychoanalysis, our lives stay hidden, harboring our precious information like a piece of decaying food behind a major molar in our country's maw,

Larry Kramer