Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
— John Lithgow
I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.
I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.
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.
I have a love/hate relationship with my height - I am 6 ft. 4 in.
I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.
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.
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 probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I'm fun.
I'm getting older, but better, too. And the roles are getting better.
Other people have often had more faith in me than I had in myself - I never thought I could pull off Roberta Muldoon in 'The World According to Garp,' or 'Of Mice and Men's' Lennie as one of my first acting jobs.
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.
We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.
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.
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 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.
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'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.
One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don't communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.
I actually was very proud of 'Dexter' and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.
Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
I eat way too fast.
Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.
I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.
Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
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.
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.
Will Ferrell is my new favorite person in the business. He's a completely adorable man.
I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
The theater is my power center, and I love doing it in New York.
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.
We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.
Actors are not necessarily smart people.
When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they're rare.
I am a storyteller, and the stories I tell are, when I'm lucky, really good ones. It's a very exciting thing to do with your life, and that's, I think, what keeps me hopeful.
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.
'M. Butterfly' is usually the answer to the question, 'What has been your favorite experience?' The reason being, it is an astonishing play.
Next to the word 'luvvie' in the dictionary, there's a picture of me. At least in the American editions.
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.
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.
I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!
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.
I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.
Churchill is so particular. He's as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me.
It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.
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.
My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I'd be right back living on the Upper West Side.
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.
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.
My worst audition was for Tim Burton for 'Batman.'
