Top 60 John Lithgow Quotes

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.

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.

An artist is always thinking of something else. My father was like that. He had this feeling of abstraction, and I do, too.

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.

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

I can’t imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it’s so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it’s fun, and you get to live at home.

I got to have a great big knock-down, drag-out fight with Sylvester Stallone. Every actor should have that much fun at some point. You can hit him as hard as you can, and it’s never enough for him.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I keep looking for things I haven’t done yet.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.

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.

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

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

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

I have a lot of faith in people.

As an actor ages north of 60, he tends to be in more father roles than anything else. It’s generational. And it tends to be a relationship that fascinates people, the flawed relationships between parents and kids.

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.

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

When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they’re rare.

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

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

In 1995, I proposed the Harvard Arts Medal. The idea was to celebrate the fact that, although it’s rare, Harvard men and women do go into the creative arts. Over the years we’ve had major, major figures, like Jack Lemmon, John Updike, Yo-Yo Ma, and Bonnie Raitt.

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.

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

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.

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

I never get tired of hearing compliments.

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

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

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

I look around, and 50 percent of the big-budget entertainment you are seeing these days is dystopian. This is the era of ‘Hunger Games’ and blasted landscapes and ‘The Walking Dead.’

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 eat way too fast.

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

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

The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.

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

I have a love/hate relationship with my height – I am 6 ft. 4 in.

I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.

I’m too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person’s point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It’s just my liability. Maybe I’m too empathetic. That’s the actor in me.

I’ve said no to a lot of things I’d like to have done. My agent has never seen anything like it.

My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.

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.

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

I really prize and love great painting.

One of the things you learn as an actor is that human beings are capable of almost anything. I’m sort of in the business of illustrating that fact.

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.

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