The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.
ALAN ALDA
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.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.
ALAN ALDA -
Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.
ALAN ALDA -
My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.
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Everyone opens up to one another right away. That’s a terrific thing. I love that about actors. They know how personal this job is.
ALAN ALDA -
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.
ALAN ALDA -
No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
ALAN ALDA -
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.
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Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah.
ALAN ALDA -
artists try to say things that can’t be said. in a fragile net of words, gestures, or colors, we hope to capture a feeling.
ALAN ALDA -
Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.
ALAN ALDA -
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.
ALAN ALDA -
Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe – you can’t take a taxi.
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I don’t really worry about the size of the part much any more.
ALAN ALDA -
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.
ALAN ALDA -
For humans, flying isn’t magic, it’s physics.
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But often it’s a mechanical transformation, which isn’t as interesting, and you’ve got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.
ALAN ALDA