Top 60 John Cameron Mitchell Quotes

I think as far as themes, ‘Hedwig’ is about what music meant to you as a kid and how rock n’ roll can save you; that is definitely part of it.

My favorite model of success is when people say, ‘Nobody bought that first Velvet Underground album, but everyone who did started a band.’

I have a weird propensity to know what’s going to happen in the future.

I certainly wanted Hedwig’s world to be one where identification and categories are fluid, changing, and confusing, as they are, really, in life.

I think things are dishonest if they’re not aware of sadness.

As you get older, you treasure the beautiful things of the past but also see things more clearly.

‘Hedwig’ was pretty much all the things I wanted to do that other people said I probably shouldn’t do: drag, punk rock, stand-up comedy… You know, combine them all in a thing that’s supremely uncommercial from the objective point of view.

I did take comfort in the vespers and compline. I might have become a monk if I hadn’t come out.

My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.

The things that interest me are less to do with perhaps finding myself and more to do with surviving and mercy and forgiveness.

I’ve seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

I went to a very small Catholic school. It wasn’t an easy place to be growing up gay.

What’s interesting is that some of the things I’m interested in talking about is a story which has to do with the second half of your life, which can be told through Hedwig’s voice because she’s older. If the timeline is consistent, she’s as old as me.

If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that’s less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying.

I think I was scared of the drag thing, as a lot of gay boys are. It’s sort of knocked out of you in junior high. I wouldn’t find guys who were very feminine attractive. Then, doing ‘Hedwig,’ I got to be man and woman, really butch and really femme at the same time, and I realized, this is kind of the ideal.

Compared to other liberal cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam, New Yorkers are always trying to do something, make art or love or money or whatever, and they have this phobia about standing still.

Some people end up becoming just a conservator of the one thing they did and making sure they get their merch out and all that.

It’s cool when frat boys say, ‘Yeah, ‘Hedwig!’ I’d like to see that same thing happen with ‘Shortbus.’

Drag wasn’t really on Broadway. It was considered low-class.

Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan’s parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy… individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.

Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it’s got to be a little messy to be believable.

Nothing is a calling card. Everything is what you do. If you do it in order to get somewhere else, you’re not actually doing it. If you’re thinking, ‘What is the weird thing I want to make with my friends?’ money and other things will come later.

I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.

We’re all weirdly single, middle-aged women with too much money who look to fill the void with too much shopping.

I like all kinds of input.

User-comments culture is not useful for creating original work, I think.

Bob Fosse, even though he wasn’t gay. He was certainly queer and had a huge effect on the ‘Hedwig’ film, as did Hal Ashby and Robert Altman, who had a weird butch queer feeling about him. His films almost flirted with camp but in an extremely realistic acting way.

The think that we hung the film version all on was ‘Hedwig’ on tour. On stage, it’s one theatre, one show. It just seemed natural to change it. In the film, we were able to go to flashback rather than have her talk to the audience. And we had the play to practice and to see where we had made mistakes.

I quickly found that I didn’t really fit into ‘gay culture,’ as identified by many gay people, and that it can be just as confining as straight culture, not least in the way that bisexual people are told that ‘they can’t make up their mind.’

I would love for ‘Hedwig’ to be in every tiny shopping mall so every freakish kid like I was can have a broadening experience.

In rock and roll, homosexuality was accepted, but it was less cool to say it.

I don’t like being choreographed to a T. I like to take steps and make them my own.

Some people go off to an ashram or they, you know, have a midlife crisis and buy a sports car. For me, I do ‘Hedwig,’ and I see it’s a midlife crisis maybe, and I see what’s next. And it’s a good trampoline, maybe, into the next part of my life.

I was brought up very Catholic, and the character of Tommy Gnosis got his name from there.

Doing ‘Hedwig’ was so hard that I kind of burned out on acting.

I’m not interested in replicating ‘Hedwig’ like a virus.

My mom was a little weepy. My dad was very logical about it. Once they realized you can’t change, they wanted to know that you can be happy and be gay. Once they realized that, they were very cool about it.

I remember being afraid of doing drag when I was younger because I didn’t really like my feminine side – most gay guys at some point are told that that’s the worst part of you, so that becomes a negative thing.

I’m an honorary old Jewish lady of the West Village.

I studied meditation, knowing it would be a huge new calming skill.

If I wanted to make a lot of money with ‘Hedwig,’ I could have spent all my time on it. But that’s boring.

I love a good party.

‘Hedwig’ was born in ’94. I was thinking of a theater piece; Hedwig was one of the characters.

Hedwig is on a quest; she’s on a quest as much as Jason and the Argonauts, as much as the boy in ‘A.I.’ She’s looking for something. She’s looking for her other half, and she’s on tour. Monsters, Cyclops – maybe they’re her mom? – appear on various islands.

Neil Patrick Harris is a superman of entertainment.

I actually came out the year that AIDS hit the front pages. So there was this mixed feeling about it – excitement that life’s finally begun, but it was completely tied up with mortality and danger and politics.

Coming out as a gay man, it was very much about finding my own identity and dealing with labeling.

‘Hedwig’ isn’t particularly based on me, but I think that it is autobiographical in terms of emotion.

Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.

I sometimes buy albums that I don’t like now, but that I know I will like. Coming out was the same thing. In high school, I thought, ‘I know I’m going to have to deal with this, but I’m not confident enough now.’ But when I finally did, my whole life changed.

You can make serious pop, you know? There was a time when the best movies were the most popular, and I keep thinking that can happen again.

New York is so unique, and you are not always encouraged to consider the people in the city your neighbors because of the fast pace and surface anonymity.

Nowadays, the term ‘selling out’ doesn’t exist anymore because everyone is trying to make a living.

I think it helped me like myself more, playing Hedwig.

I realized that theater was the perfect thing for me, in short bursts of intense community building.

‘Hedwig’ is not autobiographical, but what she goes through is clearly a big metaphor. She doesn’t want to be what she is, but she comes to an understanding that what happened to her has actually made her whole.

I guess historically, drag queens were imitating movie stars and luminaries. It’s kind of nice to have a movie star imitating a drag queen.

Our feet are planted in the real world, but we dance with angels and ghosts.

I’ve obviously always been aware of actor-oriented films, being an actor. Altman and Cassavetes were really strong. And then I realized their structures were quite fascinating, too.