Quotes from Leslie Jordan

People are really surprised when they meet me that I'm a recluse. People think I'm very gregarious and outgoing - and I am - I'm thinking about writing a book about it called 'The Gregarious Recluse.' How the more that you put me out there in front of audiences, the more that when I have down time I have to disappear.

Nobody really knows if there's a God - not Oprah, not Joel Osteen, not the Pope. Nobody has touched or felt or conversed with God. They say they have, but let's get real. I think that is what keeps me from coming out as an atheist. I think to myself, even the atheists don't know that there isn't a God. Nobody knows anything.

You know, you learned that very young in American culture that the feminine boys don't do well. And yet, I had a dad who was a lieutenant colonel in the army. My dad was a man's man, but he still adored me. And somehow in the midst of that, I still grew up hating the sissy in me.

I really was in jail with Robert Downey Jr.

One job I did turn down was 'How I Met Your Mother.' My character was 'creepy gay guy.' That was the character. The script said, 'Creepy gay guy gets in elevator every day with Jason Segel character and he's just being creepy.'

In 1993, I premiered my solo piece 'Hysterical Blindness and Other Southern Tragedies That Have Plagued My Life So Far' at the Hudson Mainstage Theatre. It then went to New York and ran for several months Off-Broadway.

When I was little, I was like a magpie, which is a bird that's attracted to shiny things. They'll build their nests with Christmas tree tinsel.

I knew I was as gay as a goose. Then I ended up in West Hollywood, where the queers hang from the trees. I was home. I had landed.

My mother had found this album of all these old slides from the '50s of me as a kid and I said, 'We should have these made into pictures because the color's so beautiful.' There were pictures of me from 1955 as a little baby wearing all these elaborate outfits, and in these pictures was this amazing story of a gay man and his mother.

I got sober at age forty-two.

I always call my journey into sobriety, my journey into queerdom, because I really did hate everything about myself.

I've always been interested in forensics and the way they solve things.

I can tell when I meet you, within three minutes, how you were raised. When I met Lady Gaga on the 'American Horror' set... beautifully brought up.

I will never be a Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep, the kind of actor that disappears into a role.

I do so many cruises out of Miami, all the RSVP ones. And I'm on the cruises out of Fort Lauderdale all the time. I'm always doing cruise after cruise out of there.

I feel as if I've been to Miami a million times because I do so many cruises out of Miami.

I always thought I'd be good at musicals, and it turns out I make up for my lack of skill with enthusiasm.

I grew up riding. From the time I was nineteen years old to the time I was twenty five I exercised race horses.

I'm Southern, I'm gay, I'm little - I get Ma'am'd a lot on the phone.

I'm Southern to the bone.

I don't mind playing gay because there's a whole plethora of gay roles out there, but if I get asked to play one more Southern hairdresser, I'm going to scream.

I'm very proud of my Southern accent, it's part of me.

I wasn't what you would envision for the son of an Army man. I liked doll baby clothes and twirled a baton. But my aunts and uncles tell me how much he loved me.

I can spot a homosexual at forty paces.