Alan Alda Quotes

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When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in while, or the light won't come in.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

I wouldn't live in California. All that sun makes you sterile.

It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.

Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn't know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

I'm an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger. What works for me is working out when it's useful to use that anger.

I'm in the real world, some people try to steal from me, and I stop them, frequently, take them to court. I love a good lawsuit. It's fun.

I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

I've been nominated twice before as actor in a leading part. Now I'm nominated as actor in a supporting part. If I don't win, I'll just wait until I'm nominated for being in the theater during the show. Do they have one like that?

I've never tried to manipulate my image.

If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn't look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy - I mean Jimmy as the character.

It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

It's really clear to me that you can't hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

'Never Have Your Dog Stuffed' is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

When does she do all this thinking? We're together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We've been married 48 years.

You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don't agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

I don't really worry about the size of the part much any more. It's nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there's something playable there, and if it's interesting to do, then that's nice.

Really top-notch directors, I've often worked with them just to see how they work.

No, I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it.

What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what's personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn't ring true.

And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn't mean I think that you should.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

I'm greedy for that satisfaction of doing something hard and knowing that, even though I was afraid I couldn't do it, that somehow I can deliver.

Kids are natural scientists.

In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for 'Scientific American Frontiers.'

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn't really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you're trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

I was always interested in figuring things out. I'd do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.

The President never intends to get into any kind of war situation. He gets carried away by events.

Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. 'M*A*S*H' is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.

You know what my earliest memories are? Going from one burlesque town to another. My father was in burlesque.

Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.

I made my first stage appearance when I was 6 months old.

All I've ever tried to do is play real people.

Anyone I know who's almost died has come out of it, at least for a while, looking at things differently.

M*A*S*H' was a collection of people, in front of and behind the cameras, that really clicked.

Awards shows mainly publicize the people giving the awards.

If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.

I used to not want to die in any way but in my sleep when I was a young man. I'd like to die awake now, if possible, with people around me who love me.

Why would you give money to somebody whose work you don't understand?

If scientists can't communicate with the public, with policy makers, with one another, the future is going to be held back. We're not going to have the future that we could have.

You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it.

I have a strong preference for being alive.

I think it's important for scientists to speak in their own voices and not just be mediated by journalists or others speaking for them.

The hardest thing for me about making movies, and that included 'M*A*S*H' because it was made like a movie, was starting and stopping.

The one thing I think I've noticed about shows that are supposed to be funny on television is that they've sort of become routinized, so there's an awful lot of mannerisms and joke lines that are sort of there to trigger laughter, rather than give actors a chance to play a moment.

Blind dates are treacherous. You don't know who this person is. You wonder, 'Should I call my grandma during coffee to get out of this?'

Whenever I think of how much pleasure I have interviewing scientists, I remember that they're having the real fun in actually being able to do the science.

I hated high school. It was a prison.

What's funny is that you can think you really value your life until you almost lose it.

The meaning of life is life.

You can't be aware of everything. You'd fall down the stairs if you were aware of every intricate thing involved in going down stairs.

No matter how big the audience is going to be. I'm interested in doing things that are fun.

What heartens me is to see '30 Rock' on the air. It makes me laugh from my gut, which I really like to do.

When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool's sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it.

I always loved Sid Caesar and all the people on his program.

My father sang well, and he was a handsome man. When he walked down the street, people sometimes mistook him for Cary Grant and asked for his autograph.

What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them?

I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.

I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.

I love oatmeal. To me, it's not boring. I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind - the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.

When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you're interested in the arts, you can't be interested in science.

What is beauty, anyway? It's more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn't stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what's closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it's pretty, but it probably isn't beauty.

Achingly funny as it was, Larry Gelbart's writing gave off sparks that turned a hard light on the way we are.

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

I know there's a creative side to artists to - pardon me - there's a creative side to scientists already, but there may be an artistic side, too, waiting to break free.

I've been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you're not expecting it.

For me, I find that even though I've accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn't give me a sense of satisfaction.

Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

I really don't like plays or movies that service propaganda.

I love to watch how scientists' minds work.

The whole question of fiduciary responsibility is a very old concept. You could make a movie about someone making that rule at any point in history, and within a few months, it will turn out to be timely.

Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries.

When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?

I don't watch that much TV, so I can't compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there's a lot of talking going on.

It's a funny feeling to work with people who you consider your colleagues and to realize that they actually are young enough to be your children.

To do a musical takes a tremendous amount of energy because you have to act and sing at the same time. And everything has to be precise. Because you can't forget the lyrics because the band keeps playing, you know, and you're under a certain amount of pressure.

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn't sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don't exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

I used to read science fiction a lot, and I still like science fiction when it is a model of how we really are and to see ourselves from another perspective.

I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.

I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That's what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.

Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

I'm most at home on the stage.

There is a wonderful feeling of power when you're a director, but I don't think I need that, and I'm OK without it.

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