Quotes by Armistead Maupin

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

“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. Dont make that mistake yourself. Lifes too damn short.”

“I wish someone older than me and wiser than the people in Orlando had taken me aside.”

“I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Dont make that mistake yourself. Lifes too damn short.”

“I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. Its 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.”

“Too much of a good thing is wonderful”

Nobodys happy. Whats happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on

I know I cant tell you what its like to be gay. But I can tell you what its not. Its not hiding behind words, Mama. Like family and decency and Christianity.

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.

It took so long to find you...and now I dont 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 cant help it--Im old-fashioned. I believe marriage is between a man and a man.

I couldnt write—or wouldnt write, at any rate—unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands

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 cant be called. Some of us end up like Dickens, others like Jeffrey Dahmer. Its not a question of good or evil, Pete believes. Just the random brutality of the universe and our native ability to withstand it.

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

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, youre screwed but good. Not right away, maybe, but sooner or later. You have to -- I dont 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 cant hack it without that certain goddamn someone. You have to fake the hell out of it.

Being in love is the only transcendent experience.

But Im acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in todays world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers.

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

“Nobodys happy. Whats happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on”