Best 48 quotes of Armistead Maupin on MyQuotes

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.

Being in love is the only transcendent experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I felt very close to God.... My friends say that's because I was always on my knees.

If I had my way...We would lock ourselves away from that madness out there.

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.

I had been a storyteller by instinct all my life. I was that boring little kid who made the rest of his friends sit around the campfire and listen to his ghost stories. It's been very much a part of my makeup.

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.

I'm not sure I even need a lover, male or female. Sometimes I think I'd settle for five good friends.

I’m pissed off at my Republican family back in North Carolina, several of whom came to my wedding, but who went right back and are voting for homophobes and acting like it doesn’t matter. It does matter and it’s time for the queers in this country to start saying so to their families. I think we’ve all cut them too much slack for far too long.

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.

In her opinion, the parrots were annoying arrogant. You could buy the most beautiful one in town, she observed, but that won't make it love you. You could feed it, care for it and exclaim over its loveliness, but there was nothing to guarantee that it would stay home with you. There had to be a lesson in there somewhere.

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.

I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.

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

I think many writers write because it's a convenient way to explain themselves to themselves. We take the chaos and the turmoil and the bullshit of our lives, and we make it into something that has a harmonious shape and sound.

I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.

I think there are strands in all of our lives that can be seen if we step back to recognize them. Coincidence is probably as close as I'll get to having spirituality. I do see patterns in my life sometimes, and I am thrilled by what I see. I don't think I'm going to have any further shot at it after death, and I don't think there's anybody upstairs orchestrating it for me, but I do think it happens. If there are miracles in my life, they are rooted in the fact of coincidence.

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

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

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!

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.

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?

Oh, Mona, we're all damned fools! Some of us just have more fun with it than others. Loosen up, dear! Don't be so afraid to cry . . . or laugh, for that matter. 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!

Outing is a nasty word for telling the truth.

Solitude was no reason for sloppiness

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.

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.

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.

There is no fifth destination.

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

When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nobody's happy. What's happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Two days after his twelfth birthday, a fortnight before his father was jailed for debt, Charles Dickens was sent to work in a blacking factory. There, in a rat-infested room by the docks, he sat for twelve hours a day, labelling boot polish and learning the pain of abandonment. While he never spoke publicly of this ordeal, it would always be with him: in his social conscience and burning ambition, in the hordes of innocent children who languished and died in his fiction. 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. And the outcome can't be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. It's not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

We have rules. Full disclosure, for one thing. And we're in bed with each other at the end of the day. Our commitment is for life, and we save our hearts for each other. That way we can have play AND permanency. If monogamy becomes more important than fidelity, you're bound to get hurt. It's all the lying that clobbers you, not the sex.

Your hair has always been amazing. I remember those fabulous chopsticks you used to wear." Anna wore a look of amused chagrin. "I'm afraid Mr. Greenleaf won't let me wear those anymore. I took a little tumble one night and almost harpooned the cat." This was very much the Anna she remembered: warm and self-mocking and complete present. And somehow that made it even harder to accept how frail she'd become since Mary Ann's last visit.