Quotes from Joel Grey

I wasn't sure what it would take to make it in the theater, but despite the struggle, that was all I ever really wanted.

I was small growing up, and to make matters worse, I wore glasses, and my mother dressed me in attention-getting outfits. I was a target of bullies.

When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.

Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.

I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.

For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: 'Chicago,' 'Wicked' and 'Anything Goes.'

There's a lot going on in the world that's very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we're dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

Satisfying as that 'Cabaret' role was, it is not the only thing I do. But Hollywood is somewhat limited in its perspective about what it is you do or don't do.

I had begun my professional career when I was 9 years old at the Cleveland Play House, and it was a very specific, real theater sort of like, you know, in England and the Berliner Ensemble - very devoted people. And I thought the theater was the greatest place I had ever been, and that's what I wanted to do.

Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.

My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.

I never think about my age very much. I've always lived my life the same way, full of excitement and anticipation of wonderful things and the knowledge that some not-so-wonderful things come with it.

I love that moment just before the curtain goes up, whether I'm sitting in the audience or standing backstage. It's full of expectation. It's a thrill that's unequaled anywhere.

Acting always affects every part of your life because it's such a solitary, lonely, and thrilling circumstance that you're taking on someone else's character and that responsibility. It's exhausting.

There are problems in doing television that have been plaguing me for years. I really like to have a lot of time, to rehearse and make things as good as they can be, but television often doesn't allow for that.

Eight times a week, I got to be a gay man, a remarkable gay man, and every night, that felt as full, as true, as passionate, and as authentic as I ever felt in my life.

I loved being in the theater. It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where, if you did your job, you weren't a kid - you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company.

I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden, you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off.

I love being in a show. I love the community aspect of it. I like the discipline of it, too.

I came to realize, along with being attracted to girls, I had similar feelings for boys.

After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.

I used to eat Danny Kaye's food. I had his Chinese and Italian meals, and that was as good as it gets.

When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered 'Bar Mitzvah Ranch' to sing 'Home on the Range' in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, 'I want to be an American.'

I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.