197 Quotes by John Lithgow

I certainly had my years as an out of work actor but I was married with a baby. My wife was supporting us.

I look for every opportunity to mix comedy and horror and tragedy. I love catching audiences off-guard.

Instead of being a theater actor who sometimes does movies I became a movie actor who sometimes does theater.

My father was a man of the theater. I grew up in a theater family. As a young man, as a boy, I gypsied around with my siblings and my parents to, like, eight different towns, went to eight different schools. All those things were extremely formative, and I think that's what happens.

I think there are all sorts of ways of turning into an actor, and there are a vast variety of different actors. You know, you interview plenty of actors and you know they come at it from a different direction and acting means different things to a lot of people.

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 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.

We should have charity for what the dead say. We may disapprove of what they say, but we should not insult them and revile them knowing they cannot not defend themselves.

You have to overcome enormous self-consciousness, but nudity is about the strongest thing you can do in an acting performance. It's the most unsettling or the most comic or the most sexual.