Harvey Fierstein

“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself.”

“If you deny yourself commitment, what can you do with your life?”

“Of course people are afraid. But honestly facing that fear, seeing it for what it is, is the only way of putting it to rest.”

“State-sanctioned marriage is a civil contract, period. A contract is not a judgment of moral value. It is a legal agreement between two parties that testifies to a meeting of minds between t...”

“But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the...”

“I have a lot of faith in President Obama. The thing that seems to be true of him is that he doesn't speak when you would expect him to speak. He's very measured in his response to things. He...”

“When I went into 'Fiddler,' I wondered about the response I'd get - the backlash because I'm openly gay. There was none. I toured Canada and America, and not one single review suggested that...”

“Anyone with a smart phone is a potential eyewitness cameraman capturing and transmitting stories at speeds that turn Reuter photos and traditional reporting into, well... yesterday's news.”

“You know, I always got offered other stuff. Not the romantic leads, obviously. But very often it's a role that's underwritten, where the character has no personality at all. And they need a...”

“Nothing binds a people to their leader like a common enemy. Voters don't change governments during war.”

“I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading an...”

“How time files when you's doin' all the talking.”

“It would be nice to redefine ourselves - at the moment we are drowning in diversity. That's not a bad thing, its just going to take a while before we refocus.”

“When a politician like Marco Rubio is willing to sacrifice his career defining immigration reform legislation solely to insure that gays and lesbians are denied equal protection under the la...”

“My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, bu...”

“I actually may do a musical next year... not one that I've written; one that I may star in. Plus my concert and other people's work and all of a sudden you've got a very full life.”

“I have great faith in the United States. It's the only country I would ever live in.”

“I got the regular call, that they were doing a Broadway musical of Hairspray, and would I come and audition. I was familiar with the movie, because at the time it came out my lover wrote for...”

“Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.”

“In Torch Song, I did that character almost non-stop from 1978 until I made the movie in 1987. Then I had some failure, which also colors how you react to doing other things.”