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 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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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 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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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I really prize and love great painting.
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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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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'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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If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
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I have a love/hate relationship with my height - I am 6 ft. 4 in.
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For me, working on stage is much more exhausting than all the other mediums, but it's also much more thrilling.
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We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.
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My worst audition was for Tim Burton for 'Batman.'