Top 35 Armistead Maupin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Armistead Maupin

2. “I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.”

— Armistead Maupin

3. “Love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.”

— Armistead Maupin

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4. “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!”

— Armistead Maupin

5. “The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.”

— Armistead Maupin

6. “I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life.”

— Armistead Maupin

7. “You don’t have to keep up, dear. You just have to keep open.”

— Armistead Maupin

8. “There is no fifth destination.”

— Armistead Maupin

9. “I’m not sure I even need a lover, male or female. Sometimes I think I’d settle for five good friends.”

— Armistead Maupin

10. “Being in love is the only transcendent experience.”

— Armistead Maupin

11. “My mother once told me that if a married couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love in the first year, and takes a penny out every time after that, they’ll never get all the pennies out of the pot.”

— Armistead Maupin

12. “Outing is a nasty word for telling the truth.”

— Armistead Maupin

13. “All I know is this: If you and papa are responsible for the way I am, then I thank you with all my heart, for it is the light and the joy of my life.”

— Armistead Maupin

14. “Don’t listen when they scoff That you are too old and I am young, For I am old enough to know better And you are young enough not to care.”

— Armistead Maupin

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

— Armistead Maupin

16. “I’m the age now that Rock was when he picked me up, so I can understand how he felt – how his fame limited his freedom. You get kinder as you go along.”

— Armistead Maupin

17. “But I will say that the drugs are much more ferocious then they used to be. There are people wrecking their lives with addiction, which seems much more severe.”

— Armistead Maupin

18. “Somepeople drink to foregt, I smoke to remember” Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City...”

— Armistead Maupin

19. “If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women’s shelf, and a gay shelf.”

— Armistead Maupin

20. “I want to deceive him just long enough to make him want me...”

— Armistead Maupin

21. “I think a lot of gay people who are not dealing with their homosexuality get into right- wing politics.”

— Armistead Maupin

22. “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.”

— Armistead Maupin

23. “Needing and loving are two different things.”

— Armistead Maupin

24. “I tend to prefer the shelter of fiction.”

— Armistead Maupin

25. “But I’m acutely aware that the possibility of fraud is even more prevalent in today’s world because of the Internet and cell phones and the opportunity for instant communication with strangers.”

— Armistead Maupin

26. “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.”

— Armistead Maupin

27. “The film itself involves a New York City radio storyteller, Gabriel Noone, who strikes up a friendship with one of his fans, an abused 14-year-old teenager who is suffering from AIDS, who does not have much longer to live.”

— Armistead Maupin

28. “Like I’ve always said, love wouldn’t be blind if the braille weren’t so damned much fun.”

— Armistead Maupin

29. “I’ve always drawn on bits and pieces of my own life.”

— Armistead Maupin

30. “Solitude was no reason for sloppiness.”

— Armistead Maupin

31. “But it’s amazing how many people think that gay men should slink off into the shadows when it comes to having friendships with children.”

— Armistead Maupin

32. “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.”

— Armistead Maupin

33. “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.”

— Armistead Maupin

34. “I consider myself much better adjusted than Gabriel.”

— Armistead Maupin

35. “You cannot be loved by someone who doesn’t want to know you.”

— Armistead Maupin

36. “Nobody’s happy. What’s happy? Happiness is over when the lights come on.”

— Armistead Maupin

37. “Her apartment seemed fussier than ever, as if the doilies and tassels had taken to breeding in their unguarded moments.”

— Armistead Maupin

38. “My youth would be like that, the slow decay of cherished myths – about politics and race, about love itself – until nothing was left but compost from which something authentic could finally begin to grow.”

— Armistead Maupin

39. “What are you into, anyway?” “Solitude.”

— Armistead Maupin