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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.

Self discovery is the best investment that you can make.

Sighs and silences and avoided conversations are just as important as the things you do talk about.

I guess mercy is a muscle like any other. You got to exercise it, or it just cramp right up.

Maybe there's something about the outsiderness of being Jewish that makes for a fiery feminist type.

Whether you call it radical jihadism or radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I'm happy to say either.

I am always jumping into the sausage grinder and deciding, even before I’m half ground, that I don’t want to be a sausage after all.

I always get more applause than votes.

Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.

Regrets, I've had a few but then again too few to mention. And more, much more than this, I did it my way.