Quotes By Alan Alda

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't live in California. All that sun makes you sterile.

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

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

I'm an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger. What works for me is working out when it's useful to use that anger.

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.

Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you.

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.

Kids are natural scientists.

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is really advice to myself, a reminder to myself not to avoid change or uncertainty, but to go with it, to surf into change.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

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.

Really top-notch directors, I've often worked with them just to see how they work.

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.

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.

What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.