Ian Mckellen Quotations | Page 3

You can always pick out stage actors at the Oscars: they know how to walk.

Elijah looks angelic but his beauty of spirit is what makes his Frodo leap out of the screen. Unalloyed goodness is one of the most difficult attributes to act.

It may be my rather puritanical upbringing at odds with my inborn laziness that makes me feel guilty at the end of the day, unless I am able to point at some achievement. But this need be no more impressive than cooking a meal or going for a long walk.

All other areas of my life, I'm hopeless. I can't even be certain how to boil an egg.

I've played an awful lot of people that other people would call villains, but that isn't a very helpful attitude to have if you're about to play them. They are just people, and they may do dreadful things and say dreadful things, but your job as an actor is to know why they do them or say them.

I think it's one thing to declare your sexuality, if you care about what that is. It's another thing to start talking in public about what you do in private and who you do it with. It's not that they [my significant others] don't want to be identified as gay, but that they don't want to be identified as ... with me.

For old actors, just remember that inside you're only 14. Acting is for kids. You poor old grown-ups, you've forgotten how to do what kids know automatically.

I've always longed for the theatre and acting to be popular. No actor wants to play to an empty house. We only do it for an audience. The more the merrier. I don't make any distinction between a popular TV series or blockbuster film and doing Shakespeare. They're different, but as long as the material is good and the intention is honourable, it's all the same to me.

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.

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.

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.

If I was on a march at the moment I would be saying to everyone: Be honest with each other. Admit there are limitless possibilities in relationships, and love as many people as you can in whatever way you want, and get rid of your inhibitions, and we'll all be happy.

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

[There's] nothing special about an actor's imagination, except that he uses it a lot.

In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.

No one needs to feel sorry for me or anyone else who has fallen victim to success.

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.

There's no sex in Middle Earth.

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.

I'm dead against the idea that you should try to "cure" people of being gay.

I've had enough of being a gay icon! I've had enough of all this hard work, because, since I came out, I keep getting all these parts, and my career's taken off. I want a quiet life. I'm going back into the closet. But I can't get back into the closet, because it's absolutely jam-packed full of other actors.

To know you are in the company with people who love and care for each other, as well as for whatever they are working on, is almost essential.

I’ve often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction.

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

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

I certainly wouldn't define myself as a northerner. I'm not even really sure what that means. I've lived in London for 50 years. I wasn't born here, but I have spent most of my life here. So I don't make much of it, to be honest. I'm just myself.

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.

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 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 first film role I deliberately chose to play after I came out was a raging heterosexual, John Profumo.

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

'The Lego Movie?' I've never heard of it.