A biography for John Lithgowhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“You don't see many films about a long, long relationship.”
“Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.”
“Every time I see somebody behaving truly insanely in real life, I think, 'Yes! I'm not over the top after all!'”
“Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.”
“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.”
“My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.”
“I actually was very proud of 'Dexter' and had a wonderful time doing it, which must make me an extremely weird person.”
“I do all the cooking in the family. I cook Italian, mostly, pastas and roasts, and bit by bit, I'm learning how to bake. I think cooking is a gift to other people.”
“I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.”
“I'm a lazy actor, lazier than you would think. I don't usually do a lot of research.”
“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.”
“Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.”
“Growing up in an atmosphere of storytelling made me an actor.”
“I find I have to walk a little faster in public these days, but it's very easy to remember when nobody had any idea who I was.”
“People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.”
“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.”
“I keep looking for things I haven't done yet.”
“If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.”