Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by John Lithgow
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor John Lithgow.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I have a lot of faith in people.
Money is just a low priority for me. I'm more interested in good work than a big bank account.
Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.
I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
I find I have to walk a little faster in public these days, but it's very easy to remember when nobody had any idea who I was.
I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't.
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.
I'd sleep under a Vermeer.
I went to - I got a wonderful college education. I went to Harvard. In those four years, I accumulated a lot of knowledge, but I also created a kind of habit of learning that has stayed with me my whole life.
If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
I tell young people, including my own kids, don't do this, it's too difficult. It's a career full of rejection, disappointment and failure. It's murderously hard on the ego. Don't become an actor.
The Broadway audience is made up of a greater percentage of tourists now. There's not nearly as much variety and danger and challenge in what's being offered.
To my mum, I owe security in a very insecure young life. We lived in about 10 different places because of my father's chequered career, and she always made me feel a sense of consistency and security. I was a well-mothered boy.
I gave up shame a long time ago.
Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.
My sense of myself is that I'm a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That's my job, to be ready. I'm some kind of first responder.
Churchill is so particular. He's as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me.
In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.
We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.
Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.
My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.
Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
I'm getting older, but better, too. And the roles are getting better.
I'm very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We've got to be careful and make sure we don't foul our own nest.
I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
I do all the cooking in the family. I cook Italian, mostly, pastas and roasts, and bit by bit, I'm learning how to bake. I think cooking is a gift to other people.
I love New York. I lived there all through the '70s and have lived in L.A. since the early '80s but come back all the time to do theater.
My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I'd be right back living on the Upper West Side.
Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.
I keep looking for things I haven't done yet.
I went to Princeton High School when I was very serious about being an artist.
I never get tired of hearing compliments.
One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I'm sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.
For me, working on stage is much more exhausting than all the other mediums, but it's also much more thrilling.
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
I can't imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it's so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it's fun, and you get to live at home.
I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
It's very important to stay creative and not simply to wait around for people to want you. It's the hardest thing about the business.
The theater is my power center, and I love doing it in New York.
We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.
'Love Is Strange' was just a beautiful experience in so many ways.
No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.
Everybody's a dreamer.
Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.
When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they're rare.
Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.
Oh, I'm dying to play Donald Trump someday, just because he's an unbelievable character. I'm a character actor; that's what you look for: outsized human beings.
I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.
What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.
My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
My worst audition was for Tim Burton for 'Batman.'
There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.
I auditioned for soap operas and commercials; I remember auditioning for Lays potato chips. It was a sort of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' sketch, where Captain Bligh was torturing the crew by saying, 'You can only have one Lays potato chip,' and they all rise up.
Actors are not necessarily smart people.
We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.
If it's well written and well directed and you've got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It's very rare.
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