Quotes By Alan Alda

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.