Quotes About Acceptance

There's a difference between being a drag queen on TV where the masses can tune in and watch, and then at a nightclub where you have to be a certain age to get in. There's a different decorum. We're all trying to push boundaries, but also trying to stay in our lane.

I started out as a pianist and singer in gay and piano bars - they were the only places I could get a job singing show tunes.

Someone has to take the bad role and as long as people are tuning in and watching the sport that I love, I don't mind.

Retiring for good wasn't difficult. I knew at the time it was right. I was no longer capable of achieving the standards I'd set myself and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

I love the perspective afforded by having lived five decades, a degree of bemused and muted calm, a relief from the insistent demands of a turbulent ego and rampant ambition. I'd love to stay here forever. But something tells me that 50 is a sunny idyll, a temporary state of grace, a golden afternoon.

I had a turbulent relationship with my calves, but I love them now because I realize that they were never the problem.

I have no problems with the blue astro-turf. I have got used to it, and I believe that we have got sufficient games to get accustomed to playing on blue turf.

My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.

I'll always be in some type of turmoil. So what I've tried to do is just surrender to that.

Our plans never turn out as tasty as reality.

The more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.

Change is the only constant, and to turn one's back and pretend that it is not coming is an exercise in futility.

I think we're all dealing with insecurity, and we hide that insecurity from the world, which, in turn, just hides us from the world. And it's only once we actually embrace these insecurities and love them that we can really love ourselves and others, fully.

Some things are very low profile, but if they excite me creatively, I accept them. Sometimes there are high-profile projects, and you have to do it. We all have human limitations. It is a painful decision to turn things down. Even accepting 'Slumdog Millionaire' was a decision that I had to sacrifice another project.

What we must not do - what we must never do - is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human.

In my opinion, it seems like music is taking a bit of a turn. Look at Mumford and Sons, and the Lumineers. It seems like people and music fans are enjoying the more artistic side of music, and that popular music is taking a turn and accepting that, so I appreciate that.

I was given an incredible gift growing up in the Chelsea, a space where it is completely fine to be yourself - you just had to figure out what that was. You didn't have to figure that out in the face of opposition at every turn.

I never regretted what I turned down.

My hair turned gray when I was 24.

A show hosted by a black had never been accepted, so the first time that knob's turned on, people are judging against all they have ever been taught. I may have been the first black in the house.

Do I regret how my life turned out? Of course not - not for a single second.

When I turned 60, it didn't bother me at all.

When I turned 18, my agent was like, 'You should change from Ricky to Rick.' So I thought it was a good idea. Rick never really fit. I tried for 18 years to make it work, and no one wanted to call me Rick. It should always have been Ricky. That's what it always should have been, so I'm going back to it.

I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.