The 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.
ALAN ALDAI 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.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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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.
ALAN ALDA -
This gets us back to that most pressing of human questions: why do people worry so much about other people’s holding beliefs other than their own?
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It tends to break out at unexpected times like a rare virus and mostly people with compassion and understanding are susceptible to it.
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When I’m writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.
ALAN ALDA -
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.
ALAN ALDA -
When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.
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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 -
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 -
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.
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During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me.
ALAN ALDA -
Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you.
ALAN ALDA -
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.
ALAN ALDA -
If you know what you’re looking for, that’s all you’ll get – what’s previously known. But when you’re open to what’s possible, you get something new – that’s creativity.
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Everybody’s on their toes and focused on what we’re about to do, and then there’s this moment where you relax because you see that everybody is there to do the best that they can.
ALAN ALDA -
A taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.
ALAN ALDA