Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens

Don’t get somewhere as fast as possible. Get somewhere as good as possible

Despair is the fuel of terrorism, and hope is the fuel of civilization, so we have to put more hope into the world than despair. Hatred and separation and building walls is not the way to progress. Going backward is not the way to go forward.

I realized that belief is a key ingredient in trying to do things that are difficult.

If you are an LGBT+ person and you come out, you have to go through your knight’s quest to create ground for yourself, to create a space for yourself, to stand there and say, “I exist. I have no reason to feel guilt or shame. I am proud to exist, and while I’m not perfect, I deserve to exist in society just like anyone else.” This became my first big fight. While I consider myself to be fantastically boring, I realized that if I took on my own sexual identity and came out and just told people about it and tried to have a chat with them—tried to be offhand and casual about it—and tried to build our place in society and humanity, then that would be a good mission. This is where I exist in society. I am just this guy. I am transgender, and I exist. But that is just my sexuality. More important than that is that I perform comedy, I perform drama, I run marathons, and I’m an activist in politics. These are the things I do. How you self-identify with your sexuality matters not one wit. What you do in life—what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters. That is the beautiful thing.

Stamina is the big thing you have to learn if you want to achieve success in any kind of career, but especially creative careers.

I've just come to the conclusion that all women should wear whatever they want to wear and that all men should wear whatever they want to wear. If they have a problem with that, they should take it up with United Nations.

The word itself—dyslexia—is ironically very hard for dyslexic people to spell correctly

If there is a god they need to come down to Earth and explain WWII, Hitler, bowel cancer, and Croc shoes.

And there is a rule in every major religion, called the Golden Rule. Essentially: treat other people the way you’d like to be treated yourself. If we all did this, the whole world would work instantaneously. Praying, meditation—fine. But just follow the Golden Rule and the whole world works. Making the world work could be that simple.

We need to become more open minded to the idea that many of us exist on a spectrum - a continuum - of gender. That for some of us the choice isn't just one or the other - completely male or completely female - but often a combination of both. In fact, it seems there are three different lines on the sexuality spectrum: how you self identify, who you're attracted to, and what you look like. And it seems the dial can be at any place on any of those three lines.

Very advanced fashion almost joins up with having no fashion sense at all.

what you do to add to the human existence—that is what matters

If you think you can’t do a thing, you will not be able to do it. If you think you can do something, then you have a chance of achieving it. Believing doesn’t mean you will instantly be able to, but you’ve got to believe that you can, otherwise you definitely won’t be able to do it. I’ve seen a number of people who I thought could do something brilliant and creative but they didn’t seem to believe in themselves and therefore didn’t, or couldn’t, do it.

I’ll just borrow confidence from a future version of myself.

No one ever says, “This piece of creative work is crap, but they made it in a couple of weeks, so let’s go and check it out.

Real life is actually a lot of boring things with occasional spikes of interest. Eddie Izzard

But stinging nettles: They just love existing, don't they? They're bastards. Stinging nettles are the Nazis of the weed world.

I think this should be called non-victim behavior. A surprise offer of bright cheeriness and self-confidence on people who were probably about to say negative things to you, in order to make you a non-victim and just a member of society.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized you could buy a packet of cereal with a free gift and then just stick your hand in and root around in the packet until you found the free thing. It seems a much simpler way. But that took me about fifteen years to work out.

I had the luxury of knowing what I wanted to do. So I just sat on the bed and came up with a plan for myself: "I have to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. But I don't have the confidence to do a production there because I've never gone before, and I don't even know how to get there or what to do once I get there. So I will just act as if I do have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I'll just borrow confidence from a future version of myself. Once I've been to the Edinburgh Fringe and performed a show there, then I will have the confidence to go to the Edinburgh Fringe. I will go to the bank manager of confidence (in some part of my brain) and I will borrow that confidence from the future, and then I can wear it like a cloak, and I will talk to everyone with this confidence." It was out there as a concept, but it worked.

How easily men could make things much better than they are – if they only all tried together!’ Winston Churchill, 1909

The twenty-first century is a key century for us on this planet. Either we make a world, where all seven billion people have a fair chance in this century - or forget it. If we can't do this, I don't think we are going to make it as a species. Despair is the fuel of terrorism, and hope is the fuel of civilization, so we have to put more hope into the world than despair. Hatred and separation and building walls is not the way to progress. Going backward is not the way to go forward.

There were also monsters under my bed. Apparently everyone thinks there are monsters under the bed, and I was certain there was one under mine. If a monster ever does manage to get under someone’s bed for real, then that would be a bad day.

Even though America loves baseball, (American) football, and basketball, I feel it is the ultimate American game, really, because it’s a pure meritocracy, and that is what America was designed as.

That’s why I don’t like the word dysphoria. I refuse to be confused about this. It’s confusing, but I am trying to be not confused. Which is why I made up my own terminology—being in “girl mode” or “boy mode”—it’s how I describe where I am on any given day on that nonbinary continuum of gender identity, a concept that psychiatrists and sociologists and politicians and religious types don’t seem able to explain with any degree of medical or biological certainty why I wish to wear skirts and heels on certain days and trousers on others. I don’t know why, and neither do they. And I suppose, in the end, the why of it really doesn’t matter. It’s just who I am and the way I was born. That’s who a lot of us are and the way a lot of us were born.

You stick a wooden stake through the heart of your failures and they become successes.