John Lithgow Quotes
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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 gave up shame a long time ago.
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Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
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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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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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When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.
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There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.
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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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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 loved growing up in Ohio.
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I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.
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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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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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There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
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I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
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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 never get tired of hearing compliments.
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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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Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.
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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'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.
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Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.