Larry Kramer > Quotes

“There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men. Poor Bruce. Poor frightened Bruce. Once upon a time you wanted to be a soldier.
Bruce, did you know that an openly gay Englishman was as responsible as any man for winning the Second World War? His name was Alan Turing and he cracked the Germans' Enigma code so the Allies knew in advance what the Nazis were going to do — and when the war was over he committed suicide he was so hounded for being gay. Why don't they teach any of this in the schools? If they did, maybe he wouldn't have killed himself and maybe you wouldn't be so terrified of who you are. The only way we'll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn't just sexual. It's all there—all through history we've been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what's in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth. And until we do that, and until we organize ourselves block by neighborhood by city by state into a united visible community that fights back, we're doomed. That's how I want to be defined: as one of the men who fought the war.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart

“Almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“We’re all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“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.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“Holy shit," somebody muttered in the dark.
"A virgin," sputtered another.
"I didn't know they still made them."
"He just did.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“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?!”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“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,”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“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.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“Don’t lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“I gave you books. You gave me plants. Books live. Plants die.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“Humiliation is so essential to Catholics. And to faggots!”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“A penis has never been something that you pick up and put down and put away idly without consideration.”
― Larry Kramer

“There is no love in Puritanism. It turns out that these monsters that won't allow any deviation from that rigid orthodoxy are obsessed with frigging, fucking, wanking, twatty sex. Don't do it, they screamed, while that's exactly what they did. My mother's cunt was all bent out of shape to prove it...All those Puritan preachers were vindictive, vengeful men spouting hateful thoughts and threats, and it's disheartening that they're still taught in the schools with reverence. They were shits. And they spouted shit. And a goodly portion of the world is still spouting shit.”
― Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

“No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“When in doubt, eat donuts.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“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.”
― Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

“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.”
― Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

“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.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“Fred had first come to Fire Island Pines when he was thirty. He wasn’t ready for such beauty, such potential, such unlimited choice. The place scared him half to death. It was a warm and sunny weekend and there were one thousand bathing-suited handsomenesses on The Botel deck at Tea Dance. They all seemed to know each other and to touch and greet and smile at each other. And there he was, alone. Though he had acquired his 150-pound body for the first time (of his so-far three: the first for himself, the second for Feffer, number three, with muscles, for Dinky), he still felt like Mrs. Shelley’s monster, pale, and with a touch of leprosy thrown in. Not only had he no one to talk to, not only did the overwhelmingness of being confronted by so much Grade A male flesh, most of which seemed superior to his, which would make it difficult to talk to, even if he could utter, which he could not, floor him, but everyone else seemed so secure, not only with their bodies (all thin and no doubt well-defined since birth), tans, personalities, their smiles and chat, but also with that ability to use their eyes, much like early prospectors must have looked for gold, darting them hither and yon, seeking out the sparkling flecks, separating the valued from the less so, meaning, he automatically assumed, him. Their glances his way seemed like disposable bottles, no deposit, no return. He felt like Mr. Not Wanted On The Voyage, even though it was, so be it, his birthday. Many years would pass before he would discover that everybody else felt exactly the same, but came out every weekend so to feel, thus over the years developing more flexible feelings in so feeling.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendours, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realisations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart and the Destiny of Me

“All your life has been a journey to find an identity.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“We shouldn’t have to be faithful, we should want to be faithful.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“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’.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we’re abusing it.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“Like the deepest secrets in a psychoanalysis, our lives stay hidden, harboring our precious information like a piece of decaying food behind a major molar in our country’s maw,”
― Larry Kramer, The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

“Why listen to me? I can only predict epidemics and plagues.”
― Larry Kramer, The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me

“How to phrase it? Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots

“Straights don’t compare themselves to us!”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots