John Lithgow Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I'd sleep under a Vermeer.
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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.
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The theater is my power center, and I love doing it in New York.
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I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
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Money is just a low priority for me. I'm more interested in good work than a big bank account.
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I eat way too fast.
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I have a lot of faith in people.
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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.
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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.
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It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.
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Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
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It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
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Everybody's a dreamer.
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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.
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Actors are not necessarily smart people.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm getting older, but better, too. And the roles are getting better.
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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.
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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.
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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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What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.
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The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.