93 Quotes by Armistead Maupin

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

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 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.

It’s clearer and clearer as I get older that sometimes people that you share blood with are not coming along with you on the ride.

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 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.

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

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!