John Lithgow Quotes
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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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In TV and movies, you get known for a certain thing, and that's what's expected. Onstage, people are more open to whatever character you create from one play to the next.
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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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The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.
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I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.
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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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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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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 was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.
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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.
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It's not always easy to be proud of your government.
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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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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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I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
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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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Churchill is so particular. He's as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me.
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We all have our secrets, and we all have our deceptions. Acting, at its best, is all about deceiving people, and this makes it all the more interesting to us.
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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.
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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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'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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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.
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It's very important to stay creative and not simply to wait around for people to want you. It's the hardest thing about the business.
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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.