John Lithgow Quotes
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My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
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Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.
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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 gave up shame a long time ago.
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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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I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.
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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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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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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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Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He's a completely adorable man.
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It's not always easy to be proud of your government.
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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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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.
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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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Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.
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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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Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
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Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
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Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
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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 look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of 'Hunger Games' and blasted landscapes and 'The Walking Dead.'
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When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they're rare.
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I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.
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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.