Top 50 John Lithgow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.”

— John Lithgow

2. “Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.”

— John Lithgow

3. “Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.”

— John Lithgow

4. “I was married very young. I lived a very middle class life. I was married at age 21, divorced at 31. I didn’t sleep on people’s couches.”

— John Lithgow

5. “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.”

— John Lithgow

6. “Books make great gifts because they’re something you love that you can share.”

— John Lithgow

7. “I keep looking for things I haven’t done yet.”

— John Lithgow

8. “I’m a con artist in that I’m an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn’t.”

— John Lithgow

9. “You kill three people, they call you a murderer. You kill a million people, they call you a conqueror. Go figure.”

— John Lithgow

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

— John Lithgow

11. “If my life was a play, age 35 was my intermission.”

— John Lithgow

12. “My only regret is that we didn’t have more kids. I came from a family of four kids, but my wife and I just started too late.”

— John Lithgow

13. “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.”

— John Lithgow

14. “The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.”

— John Lithgow

15. “I’m very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We’ve got to be careful and make sure we don’t foul our own nest.”

— John Lithgow

16. “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.”

— John Lithgow

17. “There’s nothing like spending an evening with an audience every night.”

— John Lithgow

18. “I learned the most about myself, and you ask what I learned? Well, I learned my strengths and my weaknesses, and it’s far more important to learn about your weaknesses than your strengths.”

— John Lithgow

19. “Everybody’s a dreamer.”

— John Lithgow

20. “I’d sleep under a Vermeer.”

— John Lithgow

21. “Shakespeare is like mother’s milk to me.”

— John Lithgow

22. “If you read in front of your kids, it’s very likely that they’ll become readers, too.”

— John Lithgow

23. “It’s very interesting, I had an extremely intense experience with my dad in 2002, when he was an old man and very ill and I was taking care of him and my mother, and he was extremely depressed, virtually lost the will to live, and I realized my main job was cheering him up to save his life.”

— John Lithgow

24. “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.”

— John Lithgow

25. “It’s a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.”

— John Lithgow

26. “I can’t imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it’s so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it’s fun, and you get to live at home.”

— John Lithgow

27. “I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I’m still employed and employable.”

— John Lithgow

28. “I gave up shame a long time ago.”

— John Lithgow

29. “I’m a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.”

— John Lithgow

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

— John Lithgow

31. “I have a lot of faith in people.”

— John Lithgow

32. “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.”

— John Lithgow

33. “My great hero was that archetype of cheerful American normalcy, Norman Rockwell.”

— John Lithgow

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

— John Lithgow

35. “It’s my theory that if you hear enough applause and laughter at a young enough age, you’re doomed.”

— John Lithgow

36. “The Broadway audience is made up of a greater percentage of tourists now. There’s not nearly as much variety and danger and challenge in what’s being offered.”

— John Lithgow

37. “I really prize and love great painting. It’s so out of date now. It’s slightly come back in.”

— John Lithgow

38. “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.”

— John Lithgow

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

— John Lithgow

40. “In animation, there’s this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT’S what I was doing.”

— John Lithgow

41. “When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.”

— John Lithgow

42. “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.”

— John Lithgow

43. “Look at the darkest hit musicals – Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel – they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music.”

— John Lithgow

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

— John Lithgow

45. “One of the things that gives me a lot of pleasure about both the solo show and the book is that it tells people about my dad. He really was an important man. He was a kind of pioneer of regional theater. He was the first American producer to ever produce all of Shakespeare plays.”

— John Lithgow

46. “I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.”

— John Lithgow

47. “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.”

— John Lithgow

48. “If it’s well written and well directed and you’ve got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It’s very rare.”

— John Lithgow

49. “That’s how you deal with stardom; you make it the least important part of your life.”

— John Lithgow

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

— John Lithgow