Quotes By Alan Alda

I've been nominated twice before as actor in a leading part. Now I'm nominated as actor in a supporting part. If I don't win, I'll just wait until I'm nominated for being in the theater during the show. Do they have one like that?

I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

When does she do all this thinking? We're together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We've been married 48 years.

I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself. Be bold. When you embark for strange places, don't leave any of yourself safely on shore. Have the nerve to go into unexplored territory.

In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for 'Scientific American Frontiers.'

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.

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.

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.

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. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.

No, I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it.

You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

Begin challenging your assumptions. Your assumptions are the windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in.

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.

I've never tried to manipulate my image.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

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.

Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.

And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn't mean I think that you should.

I don't really worry about the size of the part much any more. It's nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there's something playable there, and if it's interesting to do, then that's nice.

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

I found I wasn't asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

I'm in the real world, some people try to steal from me, and I stop them, frequently, take them to court. I love a good lawsuit. It's fun.

If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.