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" 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

You

Create

Character

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Look

Out

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Comedy is very, very hard to achieve. "

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

" 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

Acting

Best

" 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. "

" The theater is my power center, and I love doing it in New York. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I loved playing Roberta Muldoon! "

" 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

Life

Life Is A

" 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. "

" I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995. "

" I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I'm fun. "

" There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night. "

" 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. "

" Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor. "

" Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug. "

John Lithgow

You

Time

" 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. "

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

" 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. "