Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
John Lithgow
Take care, be kind, be considerate of other people and other species, and be loving.
Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
My wife is a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, but otherwise, I'd be right back living on the Upper West Side.
What fascinated me most was Churchill as a young child. He had a kind of Dickensian childhood. The neglect. And he was a terrible student. His whole life is a study in trying to overcome your feelings of inadequacy.
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.'
When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they're rare.
I won two Golden Globes, and there was a long, long period in between the wins. That might be explained by the fact that when I first won the award, for '3rd Rock on the Sun,' I satirically compared aliens on the show to the Foreign Press Association. And they did not take that well.
Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.
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.
Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.
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.
Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
It's a delightful thing to do, to entertain kids. They're a completely different audience because of their total lack of irony. You're always after a total suspension of disbelief, but the only people you can really achieve it with is children.
'Love Is Strange' was just a beautiful experience in so many ways.
I am a storyteller, and the stories I tell are, when I'm lucky, really good ones. It's a very exciting thing to do with your life, and that's, I think, what keeps me hopeful.
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
One of the problems in our lives is that people from different segments of our society just don't communicate with each other, nor do you ever see entertainment where they communicate with each other and fight with each other.
I never get tired of hearing compliments.
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.
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.
I loved growing up in Ohio.
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.
No villain thinks of himself as a villain, and that's the approach I always take.
I'm getting older, but better, too. And the roles are getting better.
Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
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.
My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
My sense of myself is that I'm a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That's my job, to be ready. I'm some kind of first responder.
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.
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.
My worst audition was for Tim Burton for 'Batman.'
The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.
Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
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 really prize and love great painting.
I'm too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person's point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It's just my liability. Maybe I'm too empathetic. That's the actor in me.
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.
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.
Up there with my awards, I have a great big statue of Groucho Marx, just to put everything in perspective.
There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
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'm a very hopeful person. I mean, I'm an optimistic person, sometimes stupidly optimistic.
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.
If you go through your life being completely truthful, everybody will hate you, and something I deeply fear is being hated.
When you end a successful sitcom, the most sensible thing to do is go back to the theater.
I'm probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I'm fun.
I owe my whole career as a storyteller to my father. He was an actor/director/producer and teacher.
When I was a teenager, I remember the extraordinary feeling of accomplishment for completing 'Vanity Fair.' I don't think it was even for school.
I work very hard on motivating everything I do as an actor. Explosive moments have to be completely motivated; whether they're explosive comedy or explosive horror, they have to come organically out of a scene and an interaction with another actor.
