Neil Patrick Harris Quotes

[on being LGBT in show business] People in the business are equally as terrified now -- but I really find it a personal thing. And maybe I’m at the end of that era. I wouldn’t even want to stereotype today’s generation. But the majority of the casting departments are gay, and a lot of the executives are. I think it’s a matter of your abilities and how you carry yourself -- I don’t behave any differently toward you right now than when I am with David [Burtka, his boyfriend] in our apartment, watching "American Idol." OK, "So You Think You Can Dance." [Laughs] I can see why an agent wouldn’t want to sign on a real overtly effeminate male actor -- not because I have an aversion to them but because agents might know it limits their job opportunities.

"To the kids, David is "Daddy" and you're "Papa". You find it a more convenient system of nomenclature than "Daddy 1" and "Daddy 2", or "Sinners A and B.

(Friends, take note: Sometimes, your audience isn’t going to respond the way you’d like them to. Most times, you can’t escape by running off stage and hiding, so it’s a good idea to learn to let words roll off you, like water off a duck’s back.)

Think of me like Yoda, but instead of being little and green I wear suits.

Some would say you were in a closet. Some would say you didn’t even know you were in a house. The “truth” about a person’s sexual preference is often revealed through a long journey of tiny steps, and acceptance is one of the last ones. It’s an individual story for every person. There are unique personal prejudices in everyone, created by our families, our social circles, and mostly by ourselves. It’s tough to confront those things that you are afraid of in yourself.

There’s a kid in the middle of nowhere who’s sitting there living for Tony performances. Singing and flipping along with the Pippins, and Wickeds, and Kinkys, Matildas, and Mormons's. So we might reassure that kid, and do something to spur that kid, ‘cause I promise you, all of us up here tonight, we were that kid.

experiencing pure magic, unadulterated by cynicism or irony or self-consciousness

When I'm Sad I stop being sad, and be awesome instead.

The tots both started laughing. On the same day. I'm now obsessed with getting them to do it. Babies laughing is like opium.

Playing gay in the theater is more fulfilling than on film because you can create a whole character and a backstory and you get to chip away at something over a long period of time. When you’re acting on film you sort of have one afternoon in front of a crew to just do it. And you don’t want to then be too overt and like that stereotype. But when I was doing A Paris Letter with Josh [Radnor], I was playing someone overtly flamboyant from the ’60s seducing him, and if I did that on film, I think it would look like I was acting too hard. It’s one of the fun things one wants to do as an actor, to play the flamboyant gay guy. But when you are gay that ends up being offensive to people. Say I was asked to play a flamboyant steward in an Airplane!–type farce. It would be a difficult decision to say yes to that role at this point because a lot of people would accuse me of making a mockery of gay people.

Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.

When she is three, you catch her singing Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” a song nobody should sing until they’re at least dead.

"i have to go" "I love you"

Harold and Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay

But magic is like pizza: even when it's bad, it's pretty good.

So pluck up your courage and take that risk! Add another story to the book of your life. Even if it doesn’t go the way you planned or wanted, you’ll still learn from it.