Alan Cumming Quotes

“You know what I hate most of all in the whole wide world? ... More than people who think that if you're bisexual it means you'll fuck absolutely anyone (especially them)?”

— Alan Cumming

“You should *have* an experience; it shouldn't just *be* an experience.”

— Alan Cumming

“Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.”

— Alan Cumming

“Be who you like as long as you mean it.”

— Alan Cumming

“For yes, being a woman, even one with a penis and for the purposes of drama, really made me feel that women have been coerced into a way of presenting themselves that is basically a form of bondage. Their shoes, their skirts, even their nails seem designed to stop them from being able to escape whilst at the same time drawing attention to their sexual and secondary sexual characteristics.
And I think that has happened so that men feel they can ogle them and protect them in equal measure.”

— Alan Cumming

I have no regrets in my life even the crazy things I've been in. It all made me the I am today and I wouldn't change anything. I'm happy with who I am!

— Alan Cumming

“Here my advice to young gay person or actor its to be yourself and not to be pressured into what other people want you to be”

— Alan Cumming

“I don't understand this but I never felt any shame about my sexuality and the idea that I found boys attractive as well as girls”

— Alan Cumming

“I don't avoid anyone but I always think some people hate me.”

— Alan Cumming

“We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods - the love of a father ... We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not.”

— Alan Cumming

“Had I not had the childhood I did, would these traits not be so at the forefront of my personality? Who knows? All I know is that I am the product of all the experiences I have had, good and bad, and if I am in a happy place in my life (as I truly am), then I can have no regrets about any of the combination of events and circumstances that have led me to the here and now.”

— Alan Cumming

“It's hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I'm sad to say that this method works. If you don't give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do.”

— Alan Cumming

And we have the same colour eyes. When I look into his, I feel I'm looking into myself.

— Alan Cumming

“But I smell the roses not just to remind myself of how lucky I am, but also to wonder how on earth it all happened. I smell the roses to try and figure out how I came to be in the garden at all.”

— Alan Cumming

“The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.”

— Alan Cumming

“And so I have grown up wanting to feel secure when it comes to money, but doing so by treating it as something to be enjoyed, shared, and not given power.”

— Alan Cumming

“It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.”

— Alan Cumming

“I had to be a grown-up when I should have been a little boy, and now that I'm a grown-up my little-boyness has exploded out of me. I've lived my life backwards.”

— Alan Cumming

“Pantomime is a big thing in the cultural calendar of my country, you know. So subtlety's not my forte.”

— Alan Cumming

“Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.”

— Alan Cumming

Kids are more genuine. When they come up and want to talk to you, they don't have an agenda. It's more endearing and less piercing to your aura.

— Alan Cumming

“Romeo is the most misunderstood character in literature, I think. He's hardcore to play because he's displaying the characteristics of Hamlet at the beginning, and, well, then everything else happens.”

— Alan Cumming

“Once in a while it's good to challenge yourself in a way that's really daunting.”

— Alan Cumming

I think you can be as big as you like as long as you mean it. I really do.

— Alan Cumming

“With 'Urban Secrets,' I just really liked the idea of wandering around chatting to people.”

— Alan Cumming

“I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I'm choosing my homeland. It's funny: when you get older these things creep up to you.”

— Alan Cumming

“Actually I like working kind of fast, because if you got it, why bother doing it over and over?”

— Alan Cumming

“Actors aren't stupid, mostly, and if there's a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director's going for, if you're aware of that too, you can do things to help that.”

— Alan Cumming

“I like the tragedies way more than the comedies because they're so universal.”

— Alan Cumming

I like working on things that are very different and that involve different disguises.

— Alan Cumming

“Sometimes with people I know, they're playing the hunky action guy and there's resistance to them coming out because it's so connected to straight masculinity. There's a plastic kind of movie star who has a very short shelf with very small kind of ambition. I see that but I still don't agree with it.”

— Alan Cumming

You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone's tired, things get on top of them.

— Alan Cumming

“You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.”

— Alan Cumming

“A sweaty Macbeth with blood on his arms coming in fresh from the battle doesn't interest me.”

— Alan Cumming

There are some days when you don't feel like being Alan Cumming.

— Alan Cumming

“When there's an adult person who's scaring you, you grow up pretty quickly.”

— Alan Cumming

“I'm not a fan of Twitter.”

— Alan Cumming

“I'm quite good, though I say it myself, at making strangers feel at ease.”

— Alan Cumming

“In my first year at drama school, I did this kids' show called 'Let's See.'”

— Alan Cumming

It's really rare for film directors to be that interested in things other than themselves.

— Alan Cumming

“Macbeth was the first play I ever read.”

— Alan Cumming

I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it's a struggle sustaining that, because there's such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.

— Alan Cumming

Nowadays people don't know how to handle it if all the ends aren't tied up and they're not told what to think in films. And if they're challenged, they think it's something wrong with the film.

— Alan Cumming

“The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.”

— Alan Cumming

It's interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That's what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I'm slightly setting up the audience that there's a bit of fun involved, as well.

— Alan Cumming

If you are a cabaret artist and you are mostly singing other people's songs, you're asking them to rethink a song, listen to it in a different way. The most impact you can have while asking them to re-listen to a song is if it's a song they know very well.

— Alan Cumming

“Often for me, if I hear a song I know, it clicks for me and I hear it in a different way and I think, I could sing that song. I've got something to say about that song. Wanting to connect with an audience and wanting them to rethink songs; it is actually important to do songs they're familiar with. Also, I love those songs. In a way, I think I've changed people's perceptions of what a cabaret show like this could be.”

— Alan Cumming

I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.

— Alan Cumming

I think people deny themselves by putting themselves into categories.

— Alan Cumming

“He ... knew, in that instant, that his life would not be an easy one-he was different, he looked different, he thought differently.”

— Alan Cumming