Ian McKellen Quotes

'The Da Vinci Code' is the most popular book of our times.

Why not celebrate those who want to marry and bring up a family?

If we just made one movie, 'The Hobbit,' the fact is that all the fans, the eight-, nine- and 10-year-old boys, they would watch it 1,000 times. Now, they've got three films they can watch 1,000 times.

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.

Doing some of the 'Lord Of The Rings' press junkets got a bit claustrophobic.

If I have any audience, they can know that anything I am in, I would go see, with the expectation of being really satisfied.

In any human-rights campaign, everybody must do what they can.

Imagine trying to be a gay actor, a gay anything in modern Russia? Where to be positively oneself, to be affectionate in public with someone you love of the same gender, or to talk of that love in the hearing of anyone under 18, will put you prison?

Some relationships get easier as you get older, depending on what sort of person you are. I don't think I've got any better at them.

I'm a latecomer to popular TV. This is rather new to me, being in a sitcom. It's been an ambition of mine.

When I was playing Gandalf, I didn't think, 'Oh my dear, I'm playing a 7,000 year old wizard,' because I've never met one, and I don't know what they're like.

You put anyone in the outfit, and they look like Gandalf. Not that clever.

I often get mistaken for Dumbledore. One wizard is very much like another.

Thanks to every gay person in public and non-public life who has come out.

It's easier to go from theatre to film than the other way round. In film you're absolutely loved and cossetted and cared for. In film your director makes your performance. In theatre you're carrying it all.

Who does understand life?

Acting is no longer about lying. It's now about revealing the truth. People are at ease with me now. Honesty is the best policy.

Magneto wants to cope with the difficulties thrust upon him by society and by his own nature.

The performance is created by the director. The actor is the material. And I think that has to be true.

In Singapore, Malcolm X type of activity would be extremely difficult because the government can be very harsh on lawbreakers.

Every time you work is a challenge. There's a constant worry about it, and it's a side of acting I don't like.

You see people in Hollywood trying to make blockbuster after blockbuster, but it's not possible. There's some god up there saying, 'You will fail now.' But I suppose that's true of us all.

On the day after 9/11, I walking through the smoke and the smells of New York. There were knots of policemen everywhere. As I went past one officer, he called out: "Hi, Magneto." That's an indication of X-Men's extraordinary reach.

When I came out, I told my stepmother Gladys, and she just said she had known for years and was glad I wasn't lying anymore.

In the U.K. there is still work to be done, particularly in schools, stopping the homophobic bullies in the playground and introducing unbiased discussion on gay issues in the classroom.

Tony Blair is not a villain, but he's played the part very well.

I don't have Gandalf the White's certainty about everything.

In the past, kids didn't tell their parents they were gay, so there were never the bust-ups. Some parents react so strongly to the news that their children are gay that the reaction is, 'Get out of our house.' There's a residue of old prejudices that are going to die hard.

When you grumble about a taxi being dirty, people your own age will absolutely agree with you, whereas younger people say, 'You should be so lucky to have a taxi - I walk to work!' So I have lots of young friends, who fortunately don't treat me as a guru, a person that knows all the answers.

What's nice for me, having identified myself for years as being rather shy, is now, wherever I am, in public, there tends to be a friendly face who's pleased to see me, and I like that.

I am very lucky to be man because women have a terrible time getting older parts. It's much more difficult.

I know actors who have had to turn down good roles because they just don't pay enough. It's hard.

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.

Journalists often ask me: "Aren't you sorry that after all the work you've done, you're best known as Magneto and Gandalf?" But that's what I've always wanted - not to be known as myself. I want to draw attention to the characters.

'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.

I live for the text. It's my job.

There are some tremendous actors in the U.K. who have been knighted, and I've spent much of my life admiring many of them, like Laurence Olivier. So it's very flattering to be in their company.

Why live outside the US? Do you want health care or safe food products or democracy or something? They're all overrated. Stay for the excellent cable TV.

As for the clarity of the 48 frames, I've heard people say that it looks odd, it's too demanding, there's too much information, you don't know where to look.

It's a joy to be up close to Derek Jacobi's work. Alas, we haven't worked very much, over the years, since we were at university together, but I don't think I've missed many of his great shows and performances.

You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73; good life'. You're closer to death, and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in.

The BAFTAs give the British point of view, and the Oscars give the American point of view, but the truth is we're all working in an international industry.

The thing you notice here after America is how refreshingly ordinary people look because they haven't had their chin wrapped around the back of their ears.

My friends are my family.

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.

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.

The audience's expectations are ever-present.

WOLF BROTHER is the kind of story you dream of reading and all to rarely find.

If you are playing King Lear you are the centre of attention anyway. You don't need to draw attention to yourself. It's all laid out for you.

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.

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.

2D looks so flat. Well, it is, of course, it's flat. But 3D isn't. And for an adventure story that takes you into a long-distant, fictional world, it's ideal, I think.

I headed out to have a breather at the stage door, dressed in my tramp costume. I had my bowler hat between my feet and there were passers-by, and one of them turned back and said, 'Do you need help, brother?' And $1 fell into my hat!

I think the point to be understood is that we're all different. I've never been a fan of theories of acting. I didn't go to drama school, so I was never put through a training that was limited by someone saying, 'This is the way you should act.'

I love working in New York.

Very, very rare that you do a job knowing that the audience is desperate for you to do that job. Most films you make don't get released, is the fact.

The whole atmosphere of the book, the tone of 'The Hobbit,' is of a kid's adventure story, told in the first person by Tolkien, who is introducing young people to the notion of Middle-earth. A lot of it is very light-hearted.

I just followed my parents' example and advice on living, which was to leave the world a better place than you found it. They were professional do-gooders, ministers of the church, social workers, teachers, and missionaries, that sort of thing.

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.

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.

I love the Broadway audiences, who relish live drama and don't hesitate to display their enthusiasm.

What's upsetting about an autobiography is that the final chapter is always missing. I mean, you want the death, don't you?

Most of the time when you do a job, a play or a film, you're wondering, "Will there be an audience?"

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

One thing Middle-earth is short on is the feminine.

Gandalf is in Middle-earth to keep an eye on everybody, and that can be a rather serious matter.

There is a fantasy as old as the modern gay rights movement that if all our skins turned lavender overnight, the majority, confounded by our numbers and our diversity, and recognising a few of our faces, would at once let go of prejudice forevermore.

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.

It's an interesting but useless bit of information that every single character in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' wears a wig, and many of them wears a prosthetic - false ears, feet, hands. In my case, nose.

No one seems to wash in Middle-earth.

It is really, really wonderful that in your old age you are protected by specialists who understand your problems and sort them out for you. Well, isn't that what we all need?

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

Personally, coming out was one of the most important things I've ever done, lifting from my shoulders the millstone of lies that I hadn't even realized I was carrying.

When you're on stage with an audience, the director's nowhere to be seen. He's onto the next job.

I have been reluctant to lobby on other issues I most care about - nuclear weapons (against), religion (atheist), capital punishment (anti), AIDS (fund-raiser) because I don't want to be forever spouting, diluting the impact of addressing my most urgent concern - legal and social equality for gay people worldwide.

That was the big effect Lord of the Rings had on me. It was discovering New Zealand. And even more precious were the people- not at all like the Australians.

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.'

I've always had very catholic tastes.

I came rather late to film. I've done an awful lot of theater before - before I discovered the camera, you know, seeing everything, requiring much less acting and - and much less presentation, much less projecting, more just being.

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.

If you get criticized, good - I don't think people get criticized enough. People talk behind your back and they criticize you, but they don't often come up and say it to you.

If you've got Mystique as your girlfriend the fun you could have in bed - I've just imagined X-Men 3 might open with me in bed with Patrick Stewart.

My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, "Oh, look at us, we've got 3D" isn't in the film.

I think if I were asked to do as many as fifty takes, I would assume the director had no idea what he wanted, and was just hoping, eventually, to see it.

When I appeared in 'Coronation Street,' I lived in Manchester and enjoyed it very much.

I'm fortunate to be famous for two rather imposing characters like Magneto and Gandalf.

I think with Shakespeare you can be required to do absolutely anything at the turn of a sixpence - suddenly you go into a battle, suddenly you utter something passionate.

The demographic of our audience is young. It also contains a high proportion of black, Jewish and gay people, who have all been encouraged by society to think of themselves as oddities or mutants. I hope that's why X-Men chimes with them - it's certainly why I was attracted to the idea in the first place.

I've got a waistline to develop.

I'm the sort of person who doesn't write in ink. I only write in pencil, so it can be rubbed out.

Gandalf the Grey was always the guy I prefer. Gandalf the White was driven to do a particular job, whereas Gandalf the Grey is a bit more humane.

Until I came out, my acting was all about disguise, and thereafter it became about telling the truth.

The one thing you can ask, I think, is that actors get paid a living wage. I would like it if all the repertory theatres that currently exist could do that. It would make a huge difference.

People on television have trouble with fame because audiences think they're their mates.

Because I was in the business of translating the 'X-Men' from the very successful comics, and taking the most popular book of the 20th century in 'The Lord of the Rings,' and making it into three movies, I hope people realize I wouldn't get involved in anything I didn't think was really going to be worth their while.

I often thought my gravestone would say, 'Here lies Gandalf. He came out,'

I was brought up in industrial south Lancashire, down the cobbled road from where LS Lowry (1887-1976) lived and painted.

There are directors, and I think this is true of all directors, it would be true if I was a director - If the actor didn't want to do what I was suggesting, I would let him do it his way, and then I would say to him, "Just give me one where you do what the director wants", and that, of course, is the take that's used.

I'll never put my memoirs in print.

I can't take on all the worries of the world, you know. I can only talk about being gay and being an actor. I'll have to leave those other battles to somebody else.