Denis OHare Quotes

You have to learn to express differently. Whenever I do TV or film, I ask if I can see the shot to see, to see if it’s full body or a close-up. That helps me understand how to communicate.

I was raised on the brothers Grimm, but my favorite fairy tales in the world are Oscar Wilde’s – ‘The Nightingale and the Rose,’ ‘The Selfish Giant.’ The latter is probably my all-time favorite.

I’m a little bit of an obsessed artist, and I’m not very talented. But isn’t Suzanne Somers a bad painter?

I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That’s more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they’re really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There’s something deeply psychological.

Anybody who knows me has said, ‘I had a Denis O’Hare moment.’ I suppose in the kindest instance it means standing up for yourself. In the unkindest, it means the crazy guy in the street.

I somewhat resist the whole gay rights-vampire rights metaphor because it is fraught with problems. I don’t want to be seen as a gay man as a blood-sucking killer. I don’t think it is the way to win hearts and minds.

I read ‘Dracula’ in high school. I’ve been around vampires forever.

I think all the characters in ‘American Horror Story,’ which is why I love it, are looking for some sense of meaning, and also it’s their form of happiness.

Michael Winterbottom is one of the great directors of this century.

I’m 48, and I have been in love with vampires since I was six. I was born in 1962, so I’ve been through three or four waves of vampires. When I was growing up, we had vampire shows and movies. We were still dealing with Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and the old Christopher Lee vampires.

Comic-Con is a special kind of crazy.

I guess the big thing to say about ‘Pig Farm’ is that none of us knows if it works, and we’re going in blind. It’s in the tradition of ‘Urinetown,’ kind of – but that’s a pretty small tradition. It’s possible that it can fail.

For all the import and message of ‘The Iliad,’ it’s ultimately a story that’s meant to be heard, and the person hearing ‘The Iliad’ determines what it means.

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was ‘Plain, Honest Men’ by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of the Species,’ a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

I’ve been acting for a long time, and I’ve done a lot of things, and I’ve been maintaining my anonymity pretty well. I get recognized once a week, at most, here and there, so I’m reluctant to give that up.

I moved to New York City in ’92 and had no money. I had a lot of free time, as actors do. I would go to the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center.

Evil is such a simplistic way to describe any character, be it Iago or Caliban, or any character from history.

If you see me in New York, you’ll probably see me on my bicycle riding furiously between a city bus and a taxi cab, hitting one of them on the side and yelling at them.

I received a phone call; my agent got a phone call from Ryan Murphy saying he wanted to talk to me… And he basically outlined ‘American Horror Story’ for me and said that there’s a character named Larry the Burn Guy, and I’d like you to play it.

I hate singing. I hate dancing. I enjoyed doing ‘Cabaret’ and ‘Assassins,’ but I would wither up and die in ‘The Music Man.’

I was a fan of ‘Six Feet Under’ and was very sad when it ended, so I was not ready to switch my allegiance to another show. So I was like, ‘I’m not watching this ‘True Blood.’ Then a friend got a bootleg copy of the first four episodes, and by the third one, I was irrevocably hooked.

Whether it’s writing a monologue or writing standup or writing a screenplay or writing a play, I think staying involved in the creation of your own work empowers you in a way, even if you don’t ever do it. It gives you a sense of ownership and a sense of purpose, which I think as an actor is really important.

And I guess I’m a kid at heart in that when I go for entertainment, I want to be totally transported. I want to go somewhere else; I want to encounter different things, different beings, different universes. And so I love that aspect of being able to play those things in both ‘True Blood’ and in ‘American Horror Story.’

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.