“Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They’re not devils. They’re not monsters. They’re human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.”
― John Lithgow
“Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.”
― John Lithgow
“There’s nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m a con artist in that I’m an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn’t.”
― John Lithgow
“No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that’s the approach I always take.”
― John Lithgow
“Whenever I play a role, it’s like I’ve been kidnapped inside my own body.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m getting older, but better, too. And the roles are getting better.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We’ve got to be careful and make sure we don’t foul our own nest.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person’s point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It’s just my liability. Maybe I’m too empathetic. That’s the actor in me.”
― John Lithgow
“Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.”
― John Lithgow
“I auditioned for soap operas and commercials; I remember auditioning for Lays potato chips. It was a sort of ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ sketch, where Captain Bligh was torturing the crew by saying, ‘You can only have one Lays potato chip,’ and they all rise up.”
― John Lithgow
“Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It’s like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.”
― John Lithgow
“There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.”
― John Lithgow
“It’s a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.”
― John Lithgow
“Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.”
― John Lithgow
“My very first role was when I was 2 1/2 years old; I was one of Nora’s children in ‘A Doll’s House,’ with my father playing Torvald.”
― John Lithgow
“Good acting is really excellent carpentry.”
― John Lithgow
“My sense of myself is that I’m a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That’s my job, to be ready. I’m some kind of first responder.”
― John Lithgow
“If I don’t enjoy it, there’s something seriously wrong. There’s a reason why they call it playing, what we do. It’s ecstatic fun, and I overdo it – I mean, I can’t seem to stop – people ask me to act, and I say yes.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don’t communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“I do think – I always tell that to young people – go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don’t try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don’t make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.”
― John Lithgow
“I went to – I got a wonderful college education. I went to Harvard. In those four years, I accumulated a lot of knowledge, but I also created a kind of habit of learning that has stayed with me my whole life.”
― John Lithgow
“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.’”
― John Lithgow
“The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.”
― John Lithgow
“My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“It’s a delightful thing to do, to entertain kids. They’re a completely different audience because of their total lack of irony. You’re always after a total suspension of disbelief, but the only people you can really achieve it with is children.”
― John Lithgow
“I actually was very proud of ‘Dexter’ and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.”
― John Lithgow
“Everybody’s a dreamer.”
― John Lithgow
“Look at the darkest hit musicals – Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel – they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.”
― John Lithgow
“Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.”
― John Lithgow
“What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.”
― John Lithgow
“I find I have to walk a little faster in public these days, but it’s very easy to remember when nobody had any idea who I was.”
― John Lithgow
“I never get tired of hearing compliments.”
― John Lithgow
“Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.”
― John Lithgow
“In animation, there’s this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT’S what I was doing.”
― John Lithgow
“I have a lot of faith in people.”
― John Lithgow
“For me, working on stage is much more exhausting than all the other mediums, but it’s also much more thrilling.”
― John Lithgow
“I’d sleep under a Vermeer.”
― John Lithgow
“Shakespeare is like mother’s milk to me.”
― John Lithgow
“I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.”
― John Lithgow
“If you read in front of your kids, it’s very likely that they’ll become readers, too.”
― John Lithgow
“I gave up shame a long time ago.”
― John Lithgow
“I keep looking for things I haven’t done yet.”
― John Lithgow
“When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.”
― John Lithgow
“I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I’m still employed and employable.”
― John Lithgow
“The Broadway audience is made up of a greater percentage of tourists now. There’s not nearly as much variety and danger and challenge in what’s being offered.”
― John Lithgow
“If it’s well written and well directed and you’ve got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It’s very rare.”
― John Lithgow
“I can’t imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it’s so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it’s fun, and you get to live at home.”
― John Lithgow
“When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they’re rare.”
― John Lithgow
“Oh, I’m dying to play Donald Trump someday, just because he’s an unbelievable character. I’m a character actor; that’s what you look for: outsized human beings.”
― John Lithgow
“My worst audition was for Tim Burton for ‘Batman.’”
― John Lithgow
“Actors are not necessarily smart people.”
― John Lithgow
“I tell young people, including my own kids, don’t do this, it’s too difficult. It’s a career full of rejection, disappointment and failure. It’s murderously hard on the ego. Don’t become an actor.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“We’re in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I’m sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.”
― John Lithgow
“I love New York. I lived there all through the ’70s and have lived in L.A. since the early ’80s but come back all the time to do theater.”
― John Lithgow
“My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I’d be right back living on the Upper West Side.”
― John Lithgow
“The theater is my power center, and I love doing it in New York.”
― John Lithgow
“We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.”
― John Lithgow
“It’s pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.”
― John Lithgow
“Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He’s a completely adorable man.”
― John Lithgow
“Other people have often had more faith in me than I had in myself – I never thought I could pull off Roberta Muldoon in ‘The World According to Garp,’ or ‘Of Mice and Men’s’ Lennie as one of my first acting jobs.”
― John Lithgow
“Churchill is so particular. He’s as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don’t usually do a lot of research.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I’m fun.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“We moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was always the new kid in class, but I was good at making friends. With an upbringing like that, I was either going to become an actor or a politician. Thank God I became an actor! I’m not cut out for politics.”
― John Lithgow
“I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!”
― John Lithgow
“I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.”
― John Lithgow
“I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“I eat way too fast.”
― John Lithgow
“I have a love/hate relationship with my height – I am 6 ft. 4 in.”
― John Lithgow
“Next to the word ‘luvvie’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of me. At least in the American editions.”
― John Lithgow
“My wife tells me I always have to have a project. A ‘projectophile’ or something. It’s true. I always feel like the grass is growing under my feet.”
― John Lithgow
“’M. Butterfly’ is usually the answer to the question, ‘What has been your favorite experience?’ The reason being, it is an astonishing play.”
― John Lithgow
“I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.”
― John Lithgow
“I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m a very hopeful person. I mean, I’m an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.”
― John Lithgow
“It’s not always easy to be proud of your government.”
― John Lithgow
“The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.”
― John Lithgow
“Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.”
― John Lithgow
“The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.”
― John Lithgow
“I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it’s never enough for him.”
― John Lithgow
“I won two Golden Globes, and there was a long, long period in between the wins. That might be explained by the fact that when I first won the award, for ‘3rd Rock on the Sun,’ I satirically compared aliens on the show to the Foreign Press Association. And they did not take that well.”
― John Lithgow
“’Love Is Strange’ was just a beautiful experience in so many ways.”
― John Lithgow
“You don’t see many films about a long, long relationship.”
― John Lithgow
“If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It’s not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.”
― John Lithgow
“If you’re an actor, you tend to fool yourself into thinking you’re much younger than you are because you’re playing parts and behaving like a child all the time.”
― John Lithgow
“Grown adults often tell me that they used to sit, as children with their parents, and watch ‘3rd Rock from the Sun,’ and they would all enjoy it for completely different reasons. I think that’s part of the magic of the show.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.”
― John Lithgow
“I really prize and love great painting.”
― John Lithgow
“I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31.”
― John Lithgow
“I went to Princeton High School when I was very serious about being an artist.”
― John Lithgow
“Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.”
― John Lithgow
“When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing ‘Vanity Fair.’ I don’t think it was even for school.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m a very slow and ponderous reader, but I’m dogged.”
― John Lithgow
“When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso – I remember that experience so vividly.”
― John Lithgow
“Money is just a low priority for me. I’m more interested in good work than a big bank account.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m as vain as the next person, but I’ve made so much fun of myself over the years, and that’s very salutary as you grow older.”
― John Lithgow
“If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.”
― John Lithgow
“People have expectations from you – and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That’s how you get laughs in comedy, and that’s how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.”
― John Lithgow
“I’ve said no to a lot of things I’d like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.”
― John Lithgow
“I loved growing up in Ohio.”
― John Lithgow
“My hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead – even though I’ve never had them – are behind me.”
― John Lithgow
“When people are taking something extremely seriously, that’s the time to take out the pig’s bladder.”
― John Lithgow
“Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, ‘Yes! I’m not over the top after all!’”
― John Lithgow
“I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they’re explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.”
― John Lithgow
“Comedy is very, very hard to achieve.”
― John Lithgow
“It’s wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It’s kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
“I’m an avid Boston Red Sox fan.”
― John Lithgow
“As an actor ages north of 60, he tends to be in more father roles than anything else. It’s generational. And it tends to be a relationship that fascinates people, the flawed relationships between parents and kids.”
― John Lithgow
“I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting – probably to a fault.”
― John Lithgow
“I don’t deal with the nuts and bolts of life.”
― John Lithgow
“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.”
― John Lithgow
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