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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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" There are people who've enjoyed my work in the theater, and they let me know that it was special for them. I'm not going to say, 'Well, you should have seen me as Gandalf!' "

" I think I've become more modest as the years have gone on. "

" There are some fantastic parts for older actors. "

" I learned that coming out was crucial to self-esteem. "

" I was a shy gay man at a time when it was illegal to be gay. "

" I don't normally take to Yorkshiremen. "

" 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. "

" Gandalf's a good guy, and it's a good part. He says the right things, he believes the right things. An actor can have fun with it. "

" 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. "

" On the whole, actors shout when they don't know what they're doing, trying to make an impact. "

" I've got a waistline to develop. "

" I get pretty grumpy about TV. "

" I've always felt that 'X-Men' was about something serious. It wasn't just fantasy. "

" You mustn't upstage the bride. "

" There's lots of Tolkien that must be confusing to people. "

" I'll never put my memoirs in print. "

" 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. "

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

" When I left Cambridge, I applied to regional repertory theaters in the U.K. and got accepted by one of them... And here I am, still at it. "

" It was wrongly assumed that I wished to become some sort of leader among gay activists, whereas in reality I was happier to be a foot soldier. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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? "

" Shakespeare's villains are fabulous because none of them know that they are villains. Well, sometimes they do. "

" 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. "

" No actor wants to play to an empty house. "

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

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