If I can’t get the girl, at least give me more money.
ALAN ALDAThe difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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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.
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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 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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The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.
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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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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.
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I play tennis non-obsessively. I seem to beat people I play a lot or half the time, so I guess I gravitate to people who are as bad as I am.
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Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe – you can’t take a taxi.
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Jean Paul Sartre says in “No Exit” that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.
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Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn’t do it.
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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.
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When I’m writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.
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Being mystified is a good beginning, because you won’t do what you’ve done before.
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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.
ALAN ALDA