John Lithgow Quotes
Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
(from a 1984 interview) My career just happened to me. I didn`t manage it. My plate is full all the time, but I never have the opportunity to choose from ten parts. I do turn down junk. I`ve played important parts in movies but I haven`t yet played the person the story is about. The joy is in the work. You can get too hung up on where you are. I`m not preoccupied with the desire to be top banana, but I do want to play bigger parts.
I`ve had parallel careers in the theatre and in movies. In the theatre, I often play characters with a strong sense of innocence who aren`t as intelligent as I am. The reason: my size. I seem sort of big and good-natured on stage. It would be too much for a big man to play a forbidding character on stage. So I play big people who are fairly gentle. It`s a wonderful thing to build a career on. What I offer to movie-makers is that I can put a tremendous amount of theatrical background and technical equipment at their disposal. I can make believable the over-the-top characters.
In general, my basic rule of thumb is just act in things you would want to see yourself in. I have a taste for all kinds of movies. Usually, it`s a question of whether it will be fun, whether I respect the people behind it, whether I would like to work with them. I`m sure I`m a serious-minded actor, but I still value the frivolity of acting. It`s a real exuberant, entertaining thing to do. I never lose track of that.
(About the constant time-slot changes and ultimate cancellation of "3rd Rock from the Sun" (1996)) "If NBC had set out to ruin it, they couldn`t have done a better job. They kept trying to use us as a weapon instead of a show to be taken care of. It would have been nice to have stayed a big hit, but I`d rather be a great show that nobody was watching than a lousy show that was a big hit, which is the case for most of the others".
