Quotes from Larry Kramer

I set out to make sense of my life. And I found out that one's life, particularly after one has written about it, doesn't make sense. Life doesn't make sense.

The little boy in me still believes everything is possible. Mom, you taught me this. And you lied. But so does art and so does hope.

Buy a dog. Dogs are faggot children.

I must confess something to you." "Confess." "I must confess to you that I've read they go and do it in the bushes and on islands and, would you believe, inside of trucks.

We are no longer animals but we are certainly not yet men.

Nothing works for everybody.

Sugar is the most important thing in my life. All the rest is just to stay alive.

I...I...I...want...your...other...arm!

It is a very peculiar feeling having to go out and seek support from the straight world for something gay.

Walter Benjamin writes: The talent of a good writer is to make use of his style to supply his thought with a spectacle of the kind provided by a well-trained body. He never says more than he has thought. Hence, his writing redounds not. . . to his own benefit, but solely to the benefit of what he wants to say.

Although God and His promise of a better life hereafter may have been dismissed by Kramer as just another false comfort, the muscular directness of his writing, its spontaneous spoken-ness, its proud discomfort, its inelegant elegance, are Jewish tropes.

How about if we say we're going to become a cross between the League of Women Voters and the United States Marines?

Kramer's unadorned prose is evocative of the best Jewish-American writing: of Singer, Malamud, Bellow, Ozick, Roth, Kunitz, Paley. This is the speech of the newly arrived, the immigrant, the oppositionist, the pariah; it is underclass, or working class, or even middle-class.

So long, Dinky. Good-bye. You're just not right for me. I want some pleasure and joy from my feeling. I must have the strength and courage not to let you or this scene dictate my emotions. It's hard to say good-bye to you. But I must have the strength and courage to say No.

NED: Why can't you just say yes? BEN: Because we have a committee. NED: But you're the senior partner and I'm your brother. BEN: I fail to see what bearing that has on the matter. You're asking me to ask my partners to give up income that would ordinarily come into their pocket.

Yes, we were the quintessential faggots, Dinky. One cock teaser and one doormat. Afraid of love. Using our bodies as barter instead of our brains as heart.

A cleaner and wiser Fred Lemish now re-enters his Champion boxer shorts and leaves his Dinky Adams. In his garden. His beautiful magical garden

Isn't it amazing how a kid can come out of all that analyzing everything incessantly down to the most infinitesimal neurosis and still be all alone?

EMMA: I'm sorry. I still don't know how to tell people. They don't teach acting in medical school.

Politics is a living thing, and living things die.

Do you know that when Hitler's Final Solution to eliminate the Polish Jews was first mentioned in the Times it was on page twenty-eight. And on page six of the Washington Post.

The title of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's report to Roosevelt was "Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," which he wrote in 1944.

Do you think they'll find a cure before I. . . How strange that sounds when you say it out loud for the first time.

The full-blooded description of this truth, the recognition and dramatization of a political cycle of birth, death, rebirth, defeat, renewal—this is true tragedy, in which absolute loss and devastation, Nothing is arrived at, and from this Nothing, something new is born.