Quotes from John Lithgow

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

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

Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.

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.

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

I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.

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

The Wodehouse language is so rich and detailed and hilarious.

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

I never get tired of hearing compliments.

I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault.

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.

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.

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.'

If a film is about love, it tends to be about tortured love or discovering love or young love. It's not this wonderful kind of comfortable, old resilient love.

I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.

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.

Books make great gifts because they're something you love that you can share.

We all grow up with inherited genes and inherited sensibilities, and they run very, very deep.

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.

What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.

I do think - 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.