John Lithgow Quotes
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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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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 loved growing up in Ohio.
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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 don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
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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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Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.
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Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
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Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.
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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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I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.
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Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
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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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Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
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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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My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
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There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.