John Lithgow

Actor

1945-10-19

Quotes by John Lithgow

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.

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• Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• My worst audition was for Tim Burton for 'Batman.'

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

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

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• Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.

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• I actually was very proud of 'Dexter' and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.

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• Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

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

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