Hugh Grant Quotes

Everyone covering 'Stage Beauty' asks me: 'What's it like to wear a dress?'

Theatre comes alive when someone cross-dresses onstage.

I would not want to play a girl who masquerades as a boy for the rest of my life.

We all have a cross-gender character: Every woman has a man that they can play, and every man has a woman that they can play.

Being perceived as a guy is nothing new or complicated to me. It is what it is.

To say that gender is performative is a little different because for something to be performative means that it produces a series of effects. We act and walk and speak and talk in ways that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a woman.

I always felt like the male from the time I was a child. There wasn't much feminine about me.

I think once I was in high school - I had boyfriends and stuff like that, but I think when I was younger, I went through a period where I looked like a boy, and people thought I was a boy.

My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree - he did strike several people as attractive - was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.

We sort of expect to see men in women's clothes. It's part of our culture. The key thing is, it has to be done quite badly.

The characters I've played that people have noticed included a cross-dresser and a transsexual.

I'm not trying to be a girl by putting on a dress - gender is separated by fabric.

Shave off your beard and wear a dress. You would be a great female impersonator.

I have a lot of characteristics that would normally be present in a guy and then less that would be present in a woman.

I wanted to show a normal young girl whose only difference was that she behaved in the way a boy might, without any sense of guilt on a moral or sexual level.

When I was very young, I wanted to be a girl. I was jealous that girls got to be princesses and wear skirts. It tormented me. When I was 6, I even heard that you could change your sex, and I was very intrigued until the moment I realized that if I changed into a girl, I would be an ugly girl, and this is the last thing I wanted to be.

A transvestite spends her entire life trying to look as feminine as possible and I have clearly spent mine celebrating my masculinity.

I was a tomboy as a kid - I was skinny and had cropped hair and was often mistaken for a boy - and up until I was about six, I had my own very fluid ideas of gender in that I believed that, somehow, an individual could choose whether or not s/he wanted to be a boy or a girl.

If I hadn't been born a woman, I would have certainly been gay.

When I was born, there was a very isolated idea of what it meant to be a man or a woman, and you belonged to one gender or the other.

When I was really little, it was very clear to me that I felt like a boy, and my friends were all boys.

My roles in the '80s were, like, gender dysphoric. I wasn't pretty, I wasn't this, I wasn't that. And I am kind of butchy, you know. That's just my thing.

What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.

We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that is simply true about us, a fact about us, but actually it's a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time, so to say gender is performative is to say that nobody really is a gender from the start.