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, Tommy's Tale

“Sometimes people do you a favour when they drop out of your life.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

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

“Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“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, Not My Father's Son

“It's actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you'll be okay.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“Be who you like as long as you mean it.”
― Alan Cumming

“Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts—what was said, what happened where and when—what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“It is a startling thing, the need to feel utterly believed.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“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, Not My Father's Son

“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, Not My Father's Son

“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, Not My Father's Son

“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

“I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“I realized that I was living my life backwards. I had to be a grown-up when I’d been a little boy, and now I was tending to the little boy who’d never had the chance to properly play… 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.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“You can't go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“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

“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, Not My Father's Son

“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 lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“Sometimes the worst thing about change is the shock of the change itself and not actually the new circumstances.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“Look at him he's just now getting ready and dressed and its 6 fucking minutes to the show! God fucking musicians.”
― 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.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son

“Go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly, you will be okay.”
― Alan Cumming

“And we have the same colour eyes. When I look into his, I feel I'm looking into myself.”
― Alan Cumming

“fuck yoga”
― 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, Not My Father's Son

“The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.”
― Alan Cumming, Not My Father's Son