Alan Alda Quotes

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

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

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.

Originality is unexplored territory. You get there by carrying a canoe - you can't take a taxi.

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.

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.

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.

Jean Paul Sartre says in "No Exit" that hell is other people. Well, our task in life is to make it heaven. Or at least earth.

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

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

Be brave enough to live creatively.

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

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.

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

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

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.

Republicans are as capable of coming up with great ideas and moving this country along as anyone - they just don't do it.

The good thing about being a hypocrite is that you get to keep your values.

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.

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

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

It's always better to be wise than to be smart.

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.

Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.

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!

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.

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.

Insanity is just a state of mind.

People who laugh together generally don't kill each other.

life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; ... it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there.

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

In the midst of the sense of tragedy or loss, sometimes laughter is not only healing, it's a way of experiencing the person that you've lost again.

I've never tried to manipulate my image.

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.

Be brave enough to live creatively . . . what you'll discover will be wonderful: yourself.

What then are doing if not creating a better place together? I think, for me the key has to be, what do I want to create? What is it I want to leave behind?

Our lives depend on good communication. Good communication helps personal relationships, it helps bosses and employees get along better. We rely on it.

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.

I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I've thought, 'Why don't I just act on that impulse?' But then, I've never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I've never hit anybody for fun.

Life is great-I wouldn't know what I'd do without it.

War is war and Hell is hell, and if you ask me, War is a lot worse.

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.

For humans, flying isn't magic, it's physics.

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.