Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Fun

You

Comedy

Related Quotes:

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

" Churchill is so particular. He's as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me. "

" 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 hairline is receding. So my days as a romantic lead - even though I've never had them - are behind me. "

" We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep. "

John Lithgow

Grow

Grow Up

" 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'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research. "

" I have a lot of faith in people. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I never get tired of hearing compliments. "

" 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. "

" I eat way too fast. "

" Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening. "

" 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'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife. "

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

" I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

Uncle

Experience

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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