A Quote by Alan Cumming

It's about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?
The positive thing about collaborating is that I cannot get distracted by coding work, because I cannot waste the other collaborator's time in the same way as I can my own. And it's always good to learn how the other person works, learn about techniques, learn social things like: how do you communicate with another person? The music I make with other people I'm much more confident about, I'm a little bit less judgemental of the outcome than with my own stuff because I know it's not only me, it's a more outside of me. Sometimes I even like them better than my own tracks.
I think everyone is always asking themselves, How is my work meaningful, how is my life meaningful? As I get older, I feel like who I am as a person and a citizen is more important than who I am in my work. But I do think it reframed slightly for me, how much I have to care about a project in order to want to do it. Sometimes, obviously, you have a take a job for money. But I think I'm quicker now when I get a script that's, say, borderline misogynist, I'm not going to go in for it. I'm thinking more about what I'm putting into the world.
I think that becoming a parent absolutely changes your entire life and certainly changes your work, and it has changed mine. It just allows you to have access to your emotions, even more than you already did. You're watching this little person grow in front of you, and you realize that you're seeing how precious life is and how quickly it goes. You get to things faster, even emotionally. I'm not as timid about reaching into some areas in myself and bringing that to my work.
When Satan cannot get a great sin in he will let a little one in, like the thief who goes and finds shutters all coated with iron and bolted inside. At last he sees a little window in a chamber. He cannot get in, so he puts a little boy in, that he may go round and open the back door. So the devil has always his little sins to carry about with him to go and open back doors for him, and we let one in and say, 'O, it is only a little one.' Yes, but how that little one becomes the ruin of the entire man!
When you're running and you are there, there's a little person that talks to you and that little person says “Oh, I'm tired”, “My lounge's about to pop”, “I'm so hurt”, “I'm so tired”, “There's no way I can possibly continue”. And you wanna quit. Right? That person, if you learn how to defeat that person when you're running you will learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life.
If you are a woman, if you're a person of color, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person of intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way, or else you're worthless... For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution, and our revolution is long overdue.
I've had so many horrible things happen in my life since I did 'Home Improvement' that it's worried me about doing comedy because - how do I say this - I'm a much darker person than I was.
If I meet a wise person, I think, 'Yes, tell me more about parenting, about marriage, about how to stay in love. Tell me more about how to be a decent person living in a world that's filled with chaos.'
I do get pissed off when I'm at some gay event, and there's a 25-year-old, and he has no idea who I am. And I say, 'You need to know more about your gay history, boy.' I think the younger generation takes it a little bit for granted.
A stranger can see in an instant something in you that you might spend years learning about yourself. How awful we all are when we look at ourselves under a light, finally seeing our reflections. How little we know about ourselves. How much forgiveness it must take to love a person, to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive you’ll always be alone.
Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets. And if we remove the mystery of life, then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live, and how perhaps we're not as special as we always think we are.
You either hear the story and you're curious, and you're sort of sympathetic, or you think, "Ugh, how horrible." That's dehumanizing. How about we take that and turn Christine Chubbuck into a person and it's not about the final act, it's about her life. I felt that really strongly, and I felt a sort of deep sympathy with her. It's also why I do what I do. I want to try to make difficult people somehow relatable.
Having that little bit of breathing room to work, and not feeling like it's going to fall apart at any second, has allowed me to recover the feeling I had when I was a little kid, when I was writing stories for fun or drawing pictures for my parents to put on their refrigerator. It was about playing and doing something fun, and kind of making your own little world. And that's how art should feel for me, and how having a little bit more distance between my ass and the ground has helped me.
The thing is, you don't even want to be mad about someone calling you fat because who the f--- cares? Like if somebody tells me, 'Oh, you look curvier.' That should not be a diss. The fact is, we live in a time where that is a diss. It's horrible we can be like, 'You look so skinny,' and someone's like, 'Thank you!' That's horrible. That's equally as horrible to me. So the time we live in, it's upsetting.
A lot of life is about how you feel relating to dealing with this person or that person. If this person makes you feel good, then they're a person to be around; if they don't, they're not. Being in a band is different. The group is the more important part, and you have to kind of shift the way you look at life when you're in a group of people that you work with.
I don't think [Parkinson's] is Gothic nastiness. There's nothing on the surface that's horrible about someone with a shaky hand. There's nothing horrible about someone in their life saying, "God, I'm really tired of this shaky hand thing" and me saying, "Me, too." That's our reality. We have no control over it.
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