Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I’d said in a book I wrote that I wasn’t a believer.
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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Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you.
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Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah.
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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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For a while in my teens, I was sure I had it. It was about getting to heaven. If heaven existed and lasted forever, then a mere lifetime spent scrupulously following orders was a small investment for an infinite payoff.
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I’m very interested in the improvisation because one of the things I do is to help train scientists to communicate in a better way and more personal way when they’re making a presentation, and I use improvisation to do that.
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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.
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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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Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.
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But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’
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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.
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They’re supposed to be gigantic explosions and they’re just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough you realize how important and powerful you are.
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Don’t ever aim doubt at yourself. Laugh at yourself, but don’t doubt yourself.
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Insanity is just a state of mind.
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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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I’ve never tried to manipulate my image.
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