Look, I'm 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math!

Sure I think it is healthy to speak the truth, and be who you are, and be proud of that.

People have to do things in their own time, and that's what I did.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground with me.

I am not a sad clown. I am not a sad clown.

There are some people that the press like to pick on and not just the gay press, but the press in general. And some people, the press just doesn't care about at all.

I'm still the fat kid from high school who never had a date.

It's a cliche, but there really is no handbook about the celebrity thing; you have to figure it out as you go along.

I seem to always inspire a strong reaction one way or the other.

I'm one of those old-fashioned homosexuals, not one of the newfangled ones who are born joining parades.

People think they know who I am, because I've played so many very, very out gay men on stage, and they think that's me.

I didn't know Charlie before doing the movie, but I was a huge fan of the British Queer as Folk.

People always think I'm Jewish and changed my last name from Rabinowitz.

All I can do is try to create the best show possible, and I feel we've truly done that.

Look, I'm 40, I'm single, and I work in musical theater - you do the math!

A video taped stage performance is just - you know, it's never gonna be the same as it is if you're sitting there live in the theatre.

As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.

I don't know what goes on in their heads out in Hollywood.

I have my aluminum siding business, and that's going like a house afire.

I have to accept the fact that, no matter what I do, it's going to annoy someone.

I want the kind of career where I can move back and forth.

I'm really an honorary Jew, you know; all the best people are. I really do feel Jewish, even though I'm a Catholic. The way the Church has been behaving, I'm happy to be Jewish.

It's certainly not a shock to find that the industry has no imagination. I think people don't know what it is I do. Because half the time you're talking to people who are in their 20s, and I've been doing this for over 25 years.

My mom was Jewish, so some would call me Jewish.

One of the nicest compliments I would get very often on the street is people would say, 'I love you on 'The Good Wife.' I just can't tell whether I should like you or hate you!'

Relationships, for me, have been elusive. And I would say mostly it's been my fault. I was always more concentrated on my career. And yes, you do question people's motives. Is it just because I'm him - I'm Nathan Lane?

There's not a day in my life I'm not proud of being gay, but I just wasn't ready for that attention to be placed on it. I remember being on Oprah. Well, not on Oprah. Near Oprah. She started saying, 'Now, Nathan, you got all those girlie moves going down in 'The Birdcage,' where's all that coming from? You're so good at all that girlie stuff!'

I believe that in a great city, or even in a small city or a village, a great theater is the outward and visible sign of an inward and probable culture.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don't have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Do what you love to do and give it your very best. Whether it's business or baseball, or the theater, or any field. If you don't love what you're doing and you can't give it your best, get out of it. Life is too short. You'll be an old man before you know it.

Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.

I love making people laugh. It's an addiction and it's probably dysfunctional, but I am addicted to it and there's no greater pleasure for me than sitting in a theater and feeling a lot of people losing control of themselves.

I don't think there has been any increase in sophistication in the audience. When people are aware of a concept that's easy to understand, and there's an actor who will attract them to the theater and it's a movie that's funny three-quarters of the time, it will be successful.

Sheer flattery got me into the theater. Flattery always works with me, particularly the flattery of women.

Actually, I didn't like Dartmouth very much, but the whole theater scene I really liked.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

It was very natural for me to want to disappear into dark theater, I am really very shy. That is something that people never seem to fully grasp because, when you are an actor, you are meant to be an exhibitionist.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year.

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.

I'd also like to do a play. I've never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I'd like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people - and it probably is work.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

And I'm in favor of that because I have a gay son, who's a very successful theater designer.

Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater.

I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.