Lgbt People

"Every artist's problem today is: What will we do with the human?"

"For Myrth prolongeth lyfe, and causeth health."

"Yea, Custance, better (they say) a bad excuse than none."

"Gay love, God save it, so soone hotte, so soone colde."

"Since I went no grasse hath growne on my hele."

"Wowers never speede well, that have a false harte."

"I am sorie God made me so comely."

"That same manne, that renneth awaye, Maye again fight, an other daye."

"He is a clown in blackface sitting on the Supreme Court. He gets me that angry. He doesn't belong there. And for him to say, slaves have dignity. I mean, doesn't he know that slaves were in chains? That they were whipped on the back. If he saw the movie 12 Years as a Slave, you know, they were raped. And he says they had dignity as slaves or— My parents lost everything that they worked for, in the middle of their lives, in their thirties. His business, my father's business, our home, our freedom and we're supposed to call that dignified? Marched out of our homes at gun point. I mean, this man does not belong on the Supreme Court. He is an embarrassment. He is a disgrace to America."

"A bill recently approved by a Tennessee Senate committee would prohibit teachers in that state from discussing homosexuality in the classroom. The so-called "Don't Say Gay" law is premised on the misguided belief that by not talking about gay people, they can simply make us disappear. I'm here to tell Tennessee and all LGBT youth and teachers who would be affected by this law that I am here for you. In fact, I am lending my name to the cause. Anytime you need to say the word "gay", you can simply say "Takei". For example, you could safely proclaim you are a supporter of Takei marriage. If you're in a more festive mood, you can march in a Takei pride parade. Even homophobic slurs don't seem as hurtful if someone says "That is soooo Takei", and around the holidays, you can sing "Don we now our Takei apparel!"."

"I've been working with Bill Shatner yea these 40-plus years. He never seems to get it right. I gave him, "It's Takei, as in way." I even said, "as in gay"… I told him, "It's Takei, rhymes with toupee." I thought that would do it."

"Yesterday, on the 17th of May, we Norwegians celebrated our constitution day to mark the signing of Norway's constitution in 1814. Maybe it is because we are a small country: In Norway this is an important day. All over Norway children have paraded in their best clothes to the music of thousands of marching bands, and countless speeches have been made to remind each others, as fellow Norwegians, that freedom should never be taken for granted."

"I’m just really grateful and lucky that I get to keep existing in this business and existing by way of working as opposed to just being around the scene. So I love the process of making all of this. Being on set at the Sesame Workshop was one of the great things of last year for me. Getting just to work with Joss Whedon [on Dr.Horrible] for six days renegade-style was just unbelievable. Every week getting these new scripts and seeing what Barney Stinson gets to say and do is like a constant Christmas present. Things are swell."

"My job is jester -- not advocate. I’m on a situation comedy responding to [Josh Radnor’s character] Ted Mosby and his wacky adventures -- that’s my job right now. If people want to comment about where I go to dinner, they are welcome to, but it’s not my job to respond to those statements. The Internet stuff threw me for a loop because I didn’t understand where the vitriol was coming from. I thought I had been representing well, and in turn it seemed like I was quickly condemned to step to the plate, and I was fine with that."

"Playing gay in the theater is more fulfilling than on film because you can create a whole character and a backstory and you get to chip away at something over a long period of time. When you’re acting on film you sort of have one afternoon in front of a crew to just do it. And you don’t want to then be too overt and like that stereotype. But when I was doing A Paris Letter with Josh [Radnor], I was playing someone overtly flamboyant from the ’60s seducing him, and if I did that on film, I think it would look like I was acting too hard. It’s one of the fun things one wants to do as an actor, to play the flamboyant gay guy. But when you are gay that ends up being offensive to people. Say I was asked to play a flamboyant steward in an Airplane!–type farce. It would be a difficult decision to say yes to that role at this point because a lot of people would accuse me of making a mockery of gay people."

"[on being LGBT in show business] People in the business are equally as terrified now -- but I really find it a personal thing. And maybe I’m at the end of that era. I wouldn’t even want to stereotype today’s generation. But the majority of the casting departments are gay, and a lot of the executives are. I think it’s a matter of your abilities and how you carry yourself -- I don’t behave any differently toward you right now than when I am with David [Burtka, his boyfriend] in our apartment, watching "American Idol." OK, "So You Think You Can Dance." [Laughs] I can see why an agent wouldn’t want to sign on a real overtly effeminate male actor -- not because I have an aversion to them but because agents might know it limits their job opportunities."

"April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter, and the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears, April."

"I have no concern for the common man except that he should not be so common."

"But you mustn't be too sane, darlings. It really won't do in this family."

"Life can't be put on paper in all its complexity."

"Between Margaret's fine-edged art and Gladys's rough simplicity, where did the greater feminine solace lie? True art, after all, is simple."

"Life isn't just to be found, you have to work for it."

"The roots of art and play lie very close together."

"[T]he impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life."

"In writing novels I have never been able to place much importance upon the distinction between real and imagined. A novelist, it seems to me, makes as much or as little use of the real world as he needs to project his vision of life."

"All writers know aspects of life that they take very much for granted, that yet to their readers appear peculiar, special."

"People are able to live with only half a heart, to live without real compassion, because they are able to use words that are only forms."

"God knows how you Protestants can be expected to have any sense of direction," she said. "It's different with us, I haven't been to mass for years, I've got every mortal sin on my conscience, but I know when I'm doing wrong. I'm still a Catholic, it's there, nothing can take it away from me." "Of course, duckie," said Jeremy... "once a Catholic always a Catholic."

"The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they’ve been at other times."

"Angus Wilson says in Wild Garden that most of his books begin with a visual image; one of them began when he saw these two people arguing and he had to find out what they were arguing about, who they were. That fits in beautifully with the kind of visual image that started The Left Hand of Darkness."

"When was reviewing Doris Lessing's last two books from the Shikasta series, I found that she has discovered what I, to my great joy, had discovered a little earlier: that (a) if you're writing what they call science fiction, you're absolutely free-you can write anything you damn please, and (b) that if you take seriously the science fiction premise, you are furnished with an inexhaustable supply of absolutely beautiful and complex metaphors for our present situation, for who and where we are now, and I think it's not only women who have found this out. Angus Wilson was one of the first to do this with The Old Man in the Zoo years ago. That is a science fiction novel, if you look at it closely."

"His fiction – radical, satirical, polyvalent, sexually courageous, global – extended the mainstream novel, and led it somewhere else. Still not fully recognized, he was one of Britain's greatest late-twentieth-century writers."

"Youth is the time for loving, So poets often say."

"And elm-trees, massed like ostrich feather plumes, Are streaked and shot with fire."

"Sun-blistered ships on opal seas, Pacific stars split round the skies, What have I now to do with these Who know the wonder of your eyes?"

"Most of the time you're playing the crazy girl or the stripper - always the stripper! I mean, how many strippers can I play. I can do a lap dance phenomenally, and that's not a good sign, because I'm not a stripper."

"I can't imagine topping this. Really. I can't imagine doing like Little House on the Prairie gone wrong or something. I really think this will be it."

"I'm aware that people see me as a sex symbol, and it’s getting me attention. But I know I can act."

"It wasn't until in the last year and a half that I started making fun of myself and the fact that I have big boobs. I never really was comfortable with my large breasts. And I went to the plastic surgeon, and almost got a breast reduction. I didn't do it, thankfully."

"Everybody has a card that says they're a producer. I learned very quickly that if a producer wants to have dinner with me, he doesn't want to cast me, he wants to fuck me. If he wants to call my manager and set up a meeting, then that's another thing."

"A church full of singing, out of tune Everyone's gone to the moon"

"You see a long time ago life had begun Everyone went to the sun"

"Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other."

"Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says "There's Virginia gone and written a book about Vita" … Shall you mind?"

"Her appearance was indeed remarkable — strange almost beyond the reach of adjectives … She resembled a puissant blend of both sexes — Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled into one."

"I have been reading Grey Wethers—a magnificent book. The descriptions of the downs are as fine as any in the language. Such power! Such power! Not a pleasant book of course! But what English!"

"While many a lovely ship below sailed by On unknown errand, kempt and leisurely; And after each, oh, after each, my heart Fled forth, as, watching from the Downs apart, I shared with ships good joys and fortunes wide That might befall their beauty and their pride…"

"Often on the painted stair, As I passed abstractedly, Velvet footsteps, two and three, Padded gravely after me. — There was nothing, nothing there, Nothing there to see."

"Leopards on the gable-ends, Leopards on the painted stair, Stiff the blazoned shield they bear, Or and gules, a bend of vair, Leopards on the gable-ends, Leopards everywhere."

"I came from nowhere, and shall be Strong, steadfast, swift, eternally: I am a lion, a stone, a tree, And as the Polar star in me Is fixed my constant heart on thee. Ah, may I stay forever blind With lions, tigers, leopards, and their kind."