John Lithgow Quotes
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I loved growing up in Ohio.
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There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
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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 don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
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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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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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Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
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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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Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.
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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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I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.
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My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.