Quotes from Larry Kramer

By nature, Im an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed.

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

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

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

And every faggot couple I know is deep into friendship and deep into fucking with everyone else but each other and any minute any bump appears in their commitment to infinitesimally obstruct their view, out they zip like petulant kids to suck someone else's lollipop instead of trying to work things out, instead of trying not to hide, and…unh…why do faggots have to fuck so fucking much?!

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous—well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being.

We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we're abusing it.

Ah, did he not hate that word 'gay'? He thought it a strange categoriser of a life style with many elements far from zippy. No, he would de-kike the word 'faggot', which had punch, bite, a non-nonsense, chin-out assertiveness, and which, at present, was no more self-deprecatory than, say, 'American'.