John Lithgow Quotes
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What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.
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I keep looking for things I haven't done yet.
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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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I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they're explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.
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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.
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'Love Is Strange' was just a beautiful experience in so many ways.
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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.
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I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I really prize and love great painting.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.
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When people are taking something extremely seriously, that's the time to take out the pig's bladder.
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I'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.
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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.
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If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
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We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.