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.
ALAN ALDAWhen people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.
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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.
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Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.
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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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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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Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in. If you challenge your own, you won’t be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others.
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[You have to be] willing to be changed by the person you’re listening to, where you’re not just waiting for a pause so you can say your thing, but you’re actually letting them have an effect on you if they can.
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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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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.
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I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can’t put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn’t be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.
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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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Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.
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Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries
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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.
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Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.
ALAN ALDA