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.
ALAN ALDAI’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.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.
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One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.
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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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There’s plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.
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For humans, flying isn’t magic, it’s physics.
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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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I was brought up as a Catholic, and I’m no longer a Catholic.
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You’ll be a lot less likely to be caught up in bias or prejudice or be influenced by people who ask you to hand over your brains, your soul or your money because they have everything all figured out for you.
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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 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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Being mystified is a good beginning, because you won’t do what you’ve done before.
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Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.
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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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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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How can I ever hope to communicate something to you unless I get signals back from you that I’m on the right track or that I’ve started at some place that you’re familiar with?
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You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.
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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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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.
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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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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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What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing.
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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.
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When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.
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For me, I find that even though I’ve accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn’t give me a sense of satisfaction.
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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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You wouldn’t want to be called a sell-out by selling a product.
ALAN ALDA