Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by John Lithgow - Page 2

I do think - I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.

I actually was very proud of 'Dexter' and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.

I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!

I'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.

My wife tells me I always have to have a project. A 'projectophile' or something. It's true. I always feel like the grass is growing under my feet.

It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.

It's not always easy to be proud of your government.

We moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was always the new kid in class, but I was good at making friends. With an upbringing like that, I was either going to become an actor or a politician. Thank God I became an actor! I'm not cut out for politics.

Grown adults often tell me that they used to sit, as children with their parents, and watch '3rd Rock from the Sun,' and they would all enjoy it for completely different reasons. I think that's part of the magic of the show.

If you're an actor, you tend to fool yourself into thinking you're much younger than you are because you're playing parts and behaving like a child all the time.

I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'

The essence of comedy, drama, and horror is surprise. I have an uncanny ability to surprise people because they look at my face, and they don't know where I'm going.

The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.

When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.

Voice work is fun. But about three-quarters of the things you enjoy about acting are just not there. You're not working with another actor; you're not working with an audience. You're just working with a bunch of writers and a microphone. It's very abstract.

I have a love/hate relationship with my height - I am 6 ft. 4 in.

I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it's never enough for him.

If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It's not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.

People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.

It's a delightful thing to do, to entertain kids. They're a completely different audience because of their total lack of irony. You're always after a total suspension of disbelief, but the only people you can really achieve it with is children.

There's no more private family than the royal family. People who can really only be themselves with each other. The rest of us just spend all our time fascinated by them.

When people are taking something extremely seriously, that's the time to take out the pig's bladder.

I'm probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I'm fun.

Churchill faced his own diminishing capabilities and increasing irrelevance by maintaining the sense that he was the only one who could solve whatever problem was before him. He was very often wrong, of course, but then he had spent so much of his life overcoming appalling mistakes, disasters, and rejections.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

I'm too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person's point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It's just my liability. Maybe I'm too empathetic. That's the actor in me.

I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.

I eat way too fast.

I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.

I've said no to a lot of things I'd like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.

Next to the word 'luvvie' in the dictionary, there's a picture of me. At least in the American editions.

I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.

I won two Golden Globes, and there was a long, long period in between the wins. That might be explained by the fact that when I first won the award, for '3rd Rock on the Sun,' I satirically compared aliens on the show to the Foreign Press Association. And they did not take that well.

I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.

In 1995, I proposed the Harvard Arts Medal. The idea was to celebrate the fact that, although it's rare, Harvard men and women do go into the creative arts. Over the years we've had major, major figures, like Jack Lemmon, John Updike, Yo-Yo Ma, and Bonnie Raitt.

If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.

The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.

The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.

I really prize and love great painting.

Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.

My very first role was when I was 2 1/2 years old; I was one of Nora's children in 'A Doll's House,' with my father playing Torvald.

I loved growing up in Ohio.

I'm as vain as the next person, but I've made so much fun of myself over the years, and that's very salutary as you grow older.

Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He's a completely adorable man.

Other people have often had more faith in me than I had in myself - I never thought I could pull off Roberta Muldoon in 'The World According to Garp,' or 'Of Mice and Men's' Lennie as one of my first acting jobs.

I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.

I am a storyteller, and the stories I tell are, when I'm lucky, really good ones. It's a very exciting thing to do with your life, and that's, I think, what keeps me hopeful.

You don't see many films about a long, long relationship.

I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31.

If I don't enjoy it, there's something seriously wrong. There's a reason why they call it playing, what we do. It's ecstatic fun, and I overdo it - I mean, I can't seem to stop - people ask me to act, and I say yes.

Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.

There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.

Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.

One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don't communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.

When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.

What fascinated me most was Churchill as a young child. He had a kind of Dickensian childhood. The neglect. And he was a terrible student. His whole life is a study in trying to overcome your feelings of inadequacy.

I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.

I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.

'M. Butterfly' is usually the answer to the question, 'What has been your favorite experience?' The reason being, it is an astonishing play.

An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.