Quotes from John Lithgow

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

I really prize and love great painting. It's so out of date now. It's slightly come back in.

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 went to Princeton High School, when I was very serious about being an artist. I was in a theatre family but I didn't want to become an actor.

I'd sleep under a Vermeer.

I'm a very slow and ponderous reader, but I'm dogged.

Actors are not necessarily smart people.

Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.

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.

I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31.

Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.

The zombie is the new, sort of, archetype of our times.

If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.

Growing up I didn't want to be an actor. I sort of didn't want to go into the family business; the main reason being there was something I wanted to do far more, which was be an artist.

Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.

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.

I'm an avid Boston Red Sox fan.

Anytime a culture is in economic stress, ugly things start happening.

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.

There's nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.

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

I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.

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.

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.