James Lipton Quotes

I'll miss it until the day I die, and I'm convinced to this day that I can get on a horse and jump a course of fences satisfactorily. It doesn't leave you.

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

A good day's writing, when I turn off my computer after I know that I've written okay, or as well as I can write, that's a day well spent.

Comedians don't laugh. They're too busy analyzing why it's funny or not.

Always accepting the greatest joy of all is the time that I get to spend with my wife.

I'd been on all the television programs as an actor, as a writer, as a director, as a producer.

The definition of genius, really, should be that that person can do what the rest of us have to learn how to do.

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.

I criticize those critics. The reason being that they're doing one of the worst things that ever can be done to an actor, which is to say, Look, you do what we like you to do or else.

I wanted when we began this to have a conversation, the kind that you're able to have, and the only way I knew how to do it was not to have a pre-interview.

And I thought, my God, there's an off chance that they will say something that's really worth preserving and there is one way to do that and I knew what it was because I come from television.

They will take a role that scares them over a role that doesn't. That's another thing I like about actors.

And I thought if I don't pre-interview - first of all, we couldn't afford it - but the second thing was it would force me to do my own research, which takes two weeks.

Olivier was another case of a genius, who couldn't understand why anybody would have any trouble doing this, because for him it came so easily.

I work seven days a week and I work about 12 hours a day, from the beginning of September to about the end of May; the school year. I take two days off, Christmas and New Year's, Thanksgiving sometimes - two and a half. And the result is that I bonded myself to my desk.

I was originally going to be a lawyer, and the only thing I remember from the art of cross-examination is - you can see this one coming up Sixth Avenue - never ask a question the answer to which you do not know.

When I went to school, my intention was to be a lawyer. When I attended university that was still the clear intention; I was going to be a lawyer. Why? Because it was as far as I could get from my father's antics and world. I thought that the world of the arts probably led people into the kind of behavior I had seen with him and that had resulted in a lot of hard times for my mother and me.

Landing the airplane I think is the most difficult thing that I've every learned to do in my life.

If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

There's only one man I've called a coward, and that's Brian Doyle-Murray.

What I didn't know that by sticking to craft we would blow open some doors that I never saw opened before.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.

I must confess that when I'm alone in my study, here in New York, writing; that's when I'm happy.

I jumped horses over big dangerous fences in competition. And got very, very good at it, at quite a high level. And I realized long since that, yeah, it's the same thing that appeals to me about it. You can't think about anything else, in either case; jumping horses in competition, show jumping, or flying an airplane, for whatever purpose.