James Lipton Quotations

When it began I wrote this passionate letter to people I knew, studio members, of course, and other people with whom we have worked over the years and I said come and teach our students.

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

I'd like to welcome you all to my venue, which is a bit cheeky, since it isn't my venue quite yet.

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 did get Tom Hanks to say, Life is just a box of chocolates.

It can be summed up in one sentence. Does this person have something to teach my students? No one has ever let us down.

I thought we would have at most an audience of 5,000 devotees because I made the decision to stick to craft, not to gossip, not to be interested in any of the juicy stuff that they talk about on other shows, but stick to the question of craft.

I threw Spielberg out at 12:15 in the morning. Spielberg and the students. Coppola, out at 12:15. Billy Joel out at 12:15 in the morning.

I was dealing with craft, and that's the surprising thing, the number of people who have literally broken down on our stage, because when you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.

We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything.

We still are now nothing more than a course. The show will continue to be a classroom, with the students as our audience, in a great institution.

We teach them ballroom dancing, because for so much of their careers they will be partnering each other the way you and I are right now.

The studio is meant to be always a place where, first of all, they can be out of spotlight, and second, where they could work with a peer group on parts that they might not have played otherwise.

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

Not just project, but on stage, you have to begin at the beginning and end at the end, and you're out there, you can't stop for anything.

I had something called the back of the chair test. Where I sit, we don't sit like you and I do. I can see a sliver right behind them and they come out and they sit like this like god students and they don't touch the back of the chair.

I'll tell you why, I don't invite the ones I don't like.

Because - Bobby Lewis said this once to us in class, the better you get, the less credit you'll get. Because the better you are, the more it looks like walking and talking and everybody thinks they can walk and talk.

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.

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.

The first people who responded were Arthur Penn and Sally Field and Dennis Hopper and Alec Baldwin and Paul Newman.

I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.

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.

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.

I became a professional actor in Detroit and I was able to earn some money. It was a good job because it permitted me to study. It fit perfectly with school.

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.

There are still actors who use emotional memory, affective memory, which was Lee Strasberg's emphasis, not his total emphasis. She taught everything at the Actor's Studio. But nevertheless, she felt that it impeded her.

I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.

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.

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

The Pivot Questionnaire that I ask other people, when I have on rare occasion answered it, the answer to the question, "What turns you on?" Is words. Not mine, other people's. Words, words, words, that's what turns me on.

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.

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.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.

Hackman is able to live in the moment which means there is nothing for him at that split second than what is occurring in the scene.

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

Geniuses always think it's easier than we make it out to be.

Life is just a Box of Chocolates.

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

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.

They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show.

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

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

I became an actor by accident, not by design.

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.

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.

The foundation for film acting is stage acting.

I would say that writing, both the act of writing, and of course reading of other people's work is, for me, supreme joy.

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.

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

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

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

When you're talking about the thing that is most important to someone, they're liable to feel something strong.

I think that anybody's craft is fascinating. A taxi driver talking about taxi driving is going to be very, very interesting.

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