John Lithgow Quotes
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It's wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It's kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.
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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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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.
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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.
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The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.
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I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault.
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Next to the word 'luvvie' in the dictionary, there's a picture of me. At least in the American editions.
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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.
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'M. Butterfly' is usually the answer to the question, 'What has been your favorite experience?' The reason being, it is an astonishing play.
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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.
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Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, 'Yes! I'm not over the top after all!'
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An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.
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I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.
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In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.
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I've said no to a lot of things I'd like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.
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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.
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I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
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It's not always easy to be proud of your government.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.
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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.
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If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.