Ian Mckellen Quotes

I was told that if I wanted to be a leading man in Hollywood, I couldn't possibly be thought of as gay.

There's a false concept that being gay and out in Hollywood will hurt your career. It's intrinsic homophobia. It's as if being gay is bad.

I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.

The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.

I was selling real estate at the time, in Pacific Palisades, California, so imagine that: getting a note and a bottle of champagne from Jack Nicholson when I'd barely made a dime as an actor. It really kept me going.

What I love about the gay thing is that every single person I type into Google, it doesn't matter if it's Florence Welch, anybody, if you are not being called gay you don't have a career. That's my theory!

I'm not naive to the fact that I'm an out gay actor.

If you dissect my career as an actor, and you can pull out more than enough of those type of movies, from The Hurt Locker and The Town and so on and so forth, and that's kind of where our wheelhouse is. We love it.

I’m an openly gay man playing an omnisexual hero, who is loved on both sides of the Atlantic. How could I not be proud of that?

At the worst it was eight hours of makeup, and I couldn't sit down; I was in this crouched position. [on the traumas of being an actor in full make up]

An actor's career relies on a lot of luck. Being in the right place at the right time.

I feel dance and pop music genres are extremely female and extremely gay. When it comes to art and pop culture, queers are f - king weirdos. We don't have gender rules that tell us what we can and can't be. We just make it up as we go along. We have full creative license to be whatever we want to be.

The celebrity mill is so active these days that actors can make careers out of being themselves, and I don't know that I want to. I think I'm just figuring out how to make a career out of not being myself. It's hard.

I am committed to writing appropriate books for the middle grades. This means no bad language, no gratuitous or explicit violence, and no sexual content beyond what you might find in a PG-rated movie – expressions of who likes whom, holding hands, and perhaps the occasional kiss. The idea that we should treat sexual orientation itself as an adults-only topic, however, is absurd. Non-heterosexual children exist. To pretend they do not, to fail to recognize that they have needs for support and validation like any child, would be bad teaching, bad writing, and bad citizenship.

I made the mistake early in my career, when I moved to Hollywood, of being attracted to actresses. I used to go out exclusively with actresses and other female impersonators.

In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.

I went to a gay bar, they wanted proof of sex so I showed them, they said it wasn't enough.

I hear the weed is really strong in California.

I have a lot of friends who are in mixed race relationships who are gay. But I think that the reason it bothers people is because there is not enough representation, even in the straight world, of people loving people who look like them.

Hey, guess who's gay? The Green Lantern from the comic books. Today Mitt Romney knocked him down and shaved his head.

It is long past time to eliminate bigotry in the workplace and to ensure equal opportunity for all Americans. It is time to make clear that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans are first class citizens. They are full and welcome members of our American family and they deserve the same civil rights protections as all other Americans. It is time for us to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Such discrimination is wrong and should not be tolerated.

I always wanted to be an actor and I'd never dreamt that not only would I be able to do this for a living, but also on top of that I'd be able to choose and steer the course of my own career.

It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.

There's a personal side to me of challenges as an actor that I like to take on myself.

I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.