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" 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

Out

Comedy

Work

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" I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20. "

" 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. "

" Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride. "

" 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. "

" 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

Feel

True

" In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing. "

" 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

Learning

Life

" Good acting is really excellent carpentry. "

" 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. "

" I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault. "

" Actors are not necessarily smart people. "

" My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I'd be right back living on the Upper West Side. "

" It's not always easy to be proud of your government. "

" I'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic. "

" 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. "

" If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too. "

" When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater. "

" I'd sleep under a Vermeer. "

John Lithgow

Sleep

" 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

Think

Sun

" Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective. "

" 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. "

" I eat way too fast. "

" I went to Princeton High School when I was very serious about being an artist. "

" 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

Father

Feeling

" I really prize and love great painting. "

" We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life. "

" 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. "