I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring.

I'm really not an avowed heterosexual. I'm no more proud of it than of being white or tall.

But the cure for most obstacles is, Be decisive.

Men spend their whole lives showing that they're strong and silent. They fight for independence the way women struggle to connect.

I am very proud of being the one to have coined the word.

My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen.

It wouldn't have mattered to my mother if I married a black, was gay, lived in a commune or wore a dress.

Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth.

Finally, fighting for gay rights, speaking out in various places and making friends, men and women, was great.

My dearest friend in the movement is Jack Nichols. If there were no such thing as gay or straight, we would still talk and share experiences till the end of time.

All love is original, no matter how many other people have loved before.

All who love are conspirators.

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

The roots of homophobia are fear. Fear and more fear.

I try not to deal with people's hostility, though I must if they have something I need from them, as the professors did at Columbia or my landlord did.

Men are actually the weaker sex.

People have known of Shakespeare's homosexuality down through the ages.

I didn't grow up with any concept of people being deviants unless they mistreated others.

Interestingly, the best way to promote intimacy is to demand it.

No man wants to feel that he's there because of his woman's biological clock or because he's filling a job opening for husband or significant other.

And I've known people who came out with a sense of torture.

What worse illness can there be than acute conventionality. You should pray every night that you don't wake up with it.

I felt like an apostle of the obvious and people imagined that I was doing something daring.

There is no universal coming out process, so far as I know.

You would be better off in exile than priding yourself on be like everyone else.

We are constantly creating ourselves by what we move toward or away from.

We have many cases of men committing suicide rather than face their own individuality. I know of no case of a woman who committed suicide because she was gay.

The world will step aside for nearly anyone who has the courage of his of her opinions.

We're all here at the same time and we should celebrate that.

As I said, men value their independence in a weird way, above practically everything.

If every time you engage in a sex act, you go into a confession box, you will never accept your own sexuality.

Many people secretly think that gays are a lot happier than they are, and want to punish them.

We each have a personal myth, a vision of who we really are and what we want. Health means that part of what you want is to give to others.

Hope never abandons you, you abandon it.

Every man wants to feel that his woman would love him apart from anything else.

An essential idea is that if you give to some person or endeavor in life, you will make that more important.

Homophobia is just that: a phobia.

The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.

But there is no obvious reason for holding that some normal adults are entitled to make choices for other normal adults, as paternalists of both left and right believe.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

It is obvious that the greatest and most important service that is required of our agriculture under existing conditions is an enlarged production of the staple food crops.

It is obvious that taking the country from a state of war to being a lawful state won't be easy.

Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.

If we win, someone else loses. But if someone else loses, we lose. Which is a point we're not getting. The new spirituality will make this just painfully obvious.

It is obvious that putting the Arab-Israeli dispute on a resolution track would be an important element of overcoming the confidence problem in the region.

I see no reason for recording the obvious.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

Well I would say that we're regular people first of all and we're normal and it's obvious by some of the things that have happened just because our name is famous we're not immune to tragedy.

I'm not Tom Cruise. Very few British actors are. If you look at the body of work I've done it's pretty obvious I'm not going to make a 'Mission: Impossible.'