Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

People

Enjoy

Say

" I loved playing Roberta Muldoon! "

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

" 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'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. "

" The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times. "

" 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

Audience

Challenge

" 'M. Butterfly' is usually the answer to the question, 'What has been your favorite experience?' The reason being, it is an astonishing play. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy. "

" 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. "

" 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

" For me, working on stage is much more exhausting than all the other mediums, but it's also much more thrilling. "

" Comedy is very, very hard to achieve. "

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

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

" When people are taking something extremely seriously, that's the time to take out the pig's bladder. "

" You don't see many films about a long, long relationship. "

" 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

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

" Next to the word 'luvvie' in the dictionary, there's a picture of me. At least in the American editions. "