I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.
ALAN ALDAWorking on The West Wing was similar in many ways to my experience on M*A*S*H, because you had people willing to work late at night to get it just right.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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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.
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Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.
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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.
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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.
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War is war and Hell is hell, and if you ask me, War is a lot worse.
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Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?
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It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.
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I don’t talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it’s something personal – more than personal, it’s private.
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My relationship with science is as someone who’s curious and hungry to know, hungry to understand. So all I have to offer is my ignorance and my curiosity, which is a good combination, as long as they come together.
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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