I don't consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

By nature, Im an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.

Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.

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.

You do not get more with honey than with vinegar!

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.

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.

I don't mind about the dead ones. They're dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won't let go.

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.

You don't become a success by breaking the rules. You don't become a success by obeying the rules. You become a success by inventing the rules.

It is true that a fellow cannot ignore women - but he can think of them as he ought - as sisters, not as sparring partners.

Visibility is not equality.

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

Oh, yes, I taught 13 and a half years. I taught English, first at a Catholic school and then at El Toro High School in Lake Forest, Calif.

Non-ambiguity is the shaping force of reality.

Beautiful people have many advantages, but so do friendly people.

The hard part is what separates good from great.

We prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form and to any people whatever.

If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.