Quotes from Armistead Maupin

Mona … lots of things are more binding than sex. They last longer too.

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

You don't have to keep up, dear. You just have to keep open.

You cannot be loved by someone who doesn't want to know you.

Things speed up as you circle the drain. Armistead Maupin on ageing

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.

Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us. We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives.

The bay was bright blue today, the hard fierce blue of a gas flame. If there was fog rolling in—and there must be, given the insistence of those horns—she couldn't see it from here.

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

Hey, you look at your tits; I'll look at mine! (Michael Tolliver, Tales of the City)

Could you conjugate that? To sleaze. I sleaze. You sleaze. We all have sleazen.

It occurred to Michael that this was the great perk of being loved: someone to wait for you, someone to tell you that it will get easier up ahead. Even when it might not be true.

I want to deceive him just long enough to make him want me..

There is no fifth destination.

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.

Well … everything gets old after a while. I personally get a little sick of wrecking my liver at The Lion for the privilege of tricking with some guy whose lover is in L.A. for the weekend.

we're gonna be fifty-year-old libertines in a world full of twenty-year-old Calvinists.

The worst of times in San Francisco was still better than the best of times anywhere else.

Michael's generation—its history of fighting disease and bigotry—sometimes made him grumpier than Ben would like him to be, but he knew what he'd found in Michael: a gift for intimacy like none Ben had ever known.

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.

It was like school spirit back in high school. He didn't have it then, and he didn't have it now. To him, the biggest advantage of being queer was being queer.

The earth knows exactly how to hold us if we just let it.

Brian's face turned pouty. "So you were just blowing smoke up my ass." Anna smiled dimly. "You may have been inhaling, dear, but I wasn't blowing.

Over the next eight years, almost without noticing, I arrived at a quiet revelation. You could make a home by yourself. You could fill that home with friends and friendly strangers without someone sleeping next to you. You could tend your garden and cook your meals and find predictable pleasure in your own autonomy.