Ian Mckellen quotes

Even now, there are young actors who want careers as romantic leading men, and the best thing is not to reveal you're gay.

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.

What I particularly like about Broadway is the camaraderie and the friendship of other people in other shows. Everybody knows you're opening and cares about you. There's a real village atmosphere.

I certainly don't disparage someone whose attitude towards their work is utterly different from mine - that's up to them.

Splendid architecture, the love of your life, an old friend... they can all go drifting by unseen if you're not careful.

It's only fair that stable gay relationships of long standing should have the same rights and responsibilities as married couples. I know the image of gay marriage is to some people horrific and ludicrous.

The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.

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.

The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt - people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore.

Godot is whatever it is in life that you are waiting for: 'I'm waiting to win the lottery. I'm waiting to fall in love'. For me, as a child, it was Christmas. At least that eventually came.

Acting is a very personal process. It has to do with expressing your own personality, and discovering the character you're playing through your own experience - so we're all different.

Establishing the rights for gay people to be married would cost the Australian government nothing financially and would gain for you worldwide respect from people like us and, of course, would change lives enormously - the lives of gay people and of their friends and of their families and therefore of Australia as a whole.

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