Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Comedy

Play

Laugh

Related Quotes:

" I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable. "

" Money is just a low priority for me. I'm more interested in good work than a big bank account. "

John Lithgow

Good Work

Money

" No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take. "

" I loved playing Roberta Muldoon! "

" It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Consistency

Security

" 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 eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me. "

John Lithgow

Sometimes

Eagerness

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities. "

" I really prize and love great painting. "

" I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everybody's a dreamer. "

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

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

" Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me. "

" It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows. "

" Good acting is really excellent carpentry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated. "

" Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, 'Yes! I'm not over the top after all!' "

" 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