James Lipton Quotations

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.