I’m in this wonderful position where I can do what interests me. And whatever comes along that interests me, I do. The rest of the time I bother scientists about communicating.
ALAN ALDAThe good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.
More Alan Alda Quotes
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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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I still don’t like the word agnostic. It’s too fancy. I’m simply not a believer. But, as simple as this notion is, it confuses some people.
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I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.
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A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I’ve seen actors do that.
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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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What works for me is working out when it’s useful to use that anger.
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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.
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Working 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.
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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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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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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.
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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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I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!
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Kids are natural scientists.
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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.
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Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.
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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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I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.
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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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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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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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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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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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So every day till the end of this campaign, Ill answer any question anyone has on government, but if you have a question on religion, please, go to church.
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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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Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
ALAN ALDA