John Lithgow Quotes
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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 went to Princeton High School when I was very serious about being an artist.
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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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I gave up shame a long time ago.
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When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.
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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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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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The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.
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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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I loved growing up in Ohio.
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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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I never get tired of hearing compliments.
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My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me.
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Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.
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I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
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I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.
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There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.
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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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Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
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There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
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Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
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Voice work is fun. But about three-quarters of the things you enjoy about acting are just not there. You're not working with another actor; you're not working with an audience. You're just working with a bunch of writers and a microphone. It's very abstract.
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Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.
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Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.