Larry Kramer

“How needy man is.”

“I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything.”

“One should be able to have the man one loves.”

“All your life has been a journey to find an identity.”

“Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn't take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn't exist. I don't even think the word 'gay' was in existence.”

“Don’t lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.”

“Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It's very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don't view myself as a political person. I'm just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.”

“The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America.”

“AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.”

“Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are.”

“Some reporter called me 'the angriest gay man in the world' or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.”

“Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, 'Lets think of all the poor dead people' - or 'let's honor all the dead' instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader.”

“The media in America is not covering American AIDS very much. They're covering African AIDS as if somehow miraculously it's all stopped here. Well, it hasn't, and the one thing they're not saying about Africa is that all those people are going to die; there's no way these people can be saved - none.”

“I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.”

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

“It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit.”

“I think being gay and gay people are the most wonderful things in the world. I wish all of us could have the power and pride to benefit from what is rightfully ours. Why isn't there an enormous building in Washington called the 'National Association of Lesbian and Gay Concerns' to lobby for us?”

“Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.”

“Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.”

“AIDS is a plague - numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health - though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.”