Ian Mckellen Quotes
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I'm not quite as cool as I would like to be, really.
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Quakers are terrific.
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People on television have trouble with fame because audiences think they're their mates.
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I quite like it when I'm on the Tube and people offer me their seat. Sometimes I take it. The other day I was offered a seat by a pregnant lady. I thought, 'That's going a bit far.'
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I'd never read 'Lord of the Rings' until I was asked to play Gandalf, so I didn't really know it was a frightfully famous book.
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When I went to lobby Nelson Mandela while the post-apartheid constitution was being drafted, I asked him to endorse making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of sexuality. I'd been warned that he might giggle if I mentioned homosexuality.
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Who does understand life?
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One school invited me down, as two pupils had come out, and the headmaster didn't know what to do about it. I said, 'How many students here are gay?' and he said, 'Just these two.' Clearly not. 'How many gay members of staff have you got?' He had no idea. And this was a concerned man.
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The conventional wisdom is that if you are gay, you cannot play the romantic straight lead in a movie.
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If I have any audience, they can know that anything I am in, I would go see, with the expectation of being really satisfied.
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There are still times in my life where I pull back from being totally honest, and I can't imagine a single straight person who would understand that.
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I've got a waistline to develop.
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There are not many things in my life I can be absolutely proud of or certain I got right, but one of them is that I've got better as an actor. I've learnt how to do it. And I still have enough energy to do it.
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The wonderful thing about modern medicine is that so many of these complaints that used to signify old age and decline can be coped with.
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I got better as an actor, and still I'm getting better. That's only been possible because there's always been work.
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One thing Middle-earth is short on is the feminine.
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I increasingly see organized religion as actually my enemy. They treat me as their enemy. Not all Christians, of course. Not all Jews, not all Muslims.
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There are deaths in public places on the grounds that the victim is gay.
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'King Lear,' I've been seeing all my life. I mean, the great actors of my lifetime... to join their company, as it were, by playing a part that's challenged them, is one of the great joys of being an actor who does the classics.
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'The Da Vinci Code' is the most popular book of our times.
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If you're sounding right, you're probably walking right, and vice versa. If you get the footwork right - if you get even one line right in a rehearsal, the director will say, do you know when you said that, it was exactly the character. You were - really landed on it.
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Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.
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The strength of British theatre should be that these actors in their middle years know what they're doing and are good at it. Not rich, not famous, but making a living.
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I used to comfort myself when I became an actor that it was a useful job, entertaining people. And it was important to do it as well as you possibly can.