Alan Alda Quotes

#1. We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

Alan Alda

#2. 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.

Alan Alda

#3. I come armed with a really good ignorance. I don't strive toward ignorance. I come by it naturally.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#5. I love to watch how scientists' minds work.

Alan Alda

#6. I hated high school. It was a prison.

Alan Alda

#7. 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.

Alan Alda

#8. I used to not want to die in any way but in my sleep when I was a young man. I'd like to die awake now, if possible, with people around me who love me.

Alan Alda

#9. All I've ever tried to do is play real people.

Alan Alda

#10. Life itself was an improvisation in which I was going to have to deal with what came to me and not think about what should have come.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#12. What heartens me is to see '30 Rock' on the air. It makes me laugh from my gut, which I really like to do.

Alan Alda

#13. My father sang well, and he was a handsome man. When he walked down the street, people sometimes mistook him for Cary Grant and asked for his autograph.

Alan Alda

#14. 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?

Alan Alda

#15. I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That's what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.

Alan Alda

#16. You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#18. 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.

Alan Alda

#19. You know what my earliest memories are? Going from one burlesque town to another. My father was in burlesque.

Alan Alda

#20. I don't watch that much TV, so I can't compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there's a lot of talking going on.

Alan Alda

#21. I really don't like plays or movies that service propaganda.

Alan Alda

#22. Communication doesn't take place because you tell somebody something. It takes place when you observe them closely and track their ability to follow you. Like

Alan Alda

#23. Maybe God is the ultimate bully who teases us with life, then pulls it out of reach. Maybe there's nothing I can do but let life curl up and disappear like an old photograph.
Or maybe I can get it back. Maybe imagination gets it back. Perhaps play lets it breath again.

Alan Alda

#24. 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.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#27. You can't be aware of everything. You'd fall down the stairs if you were aware of every intricate thing involved in going down stairs.

Alan Alda

#28. As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.

Alan Alda

#29. I play tennis non-obsessively. I seem to beat people I play a lot or half the time, so I guess I gravitate to people who are as bad as I am.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#31. It's a funny feeling to work with people who you consider your colleagues and to realize that they actually are young enough to be your children.

Alan Alda

#32. I was what came to mind when there was blood on the floor.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#34. 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.

Alan Alda

#35. Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries.

Alan Alda

#36. Loneliness is everything it's cracked up to be.

Alan Alda

#37. 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.

Alan Alda

#38. If a rattlesnake thinks he can swallow a mouse, he probably can. Don't assume you think like a snake unless you are one.

Alan Alda

#39. I've had many uncanny experiences. I think it's hard to be alive and not have them. But I don't know if I can decide what that means or what they are.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#41. 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.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#43. I've played a murderer, so certainly I think I can play a Republican.

Alan Alda

#44. 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.

Alan Alda

#45. 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.

Alan Alda

#46. No matter how big the audience is going to be. I'm interested in doing things that are fun.

Alan Alda

#47. Anesthetized by youth, I missed it.

Alan Alda

#48. 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.

Alan Alda

#49. Artists try to say things that can't be said. in a fragile net of words, gestures, or colors, we hope to capture a feeling; 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.

Alan Alda

#50. My relationship with science is as someone who's curious and hungry to know, hungry to understand. So all I have to offer is my ignorance and my curiosity, which is a good combination, as long as they come together.

Alan Alda

#51. What is beauty, anyway? It's more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn't stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what's closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it's pretty, but it probably isn't beauty.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#53. When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you're interested in the arts, you can't be interested in science.

Alan Alda

#54. We need to be more conversant with it because science is in our lives. It's in everything. It's in the food we eat. It's in the air we breathe. It's everywhere.

Alan Alda

#55. M*A*S*H' was a collection of people, in front of and behind the cameras, that really clicked.

Alan Alda

#56. The idea that the brain is not fully formed until you are almost 30 years old has already been introduced, and the Supreme Court already has based two rulings on it.

Alan Alda

#57. Why would you give money to somebody whose work you don't understand?

Alan Alda

#58. I used to be an amateur inventor when I was a kid; I'm always inventing something.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#60. I think most people are interested in our origins; once we understand, it might be easier to become the people we'd like to be. Or, better, become the people we think we already are.

Alan Alda

#61. 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.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#63. Awards shows mainly publicize the people giving the awards.

Alan Alda

#64. I've never tried to manipulate my image.

Alan Alda

#65. I would like to know that when I read the paper in the morning, it's telling me something that actually happened, and I think the vast majority of journalists want the same thing.

Alan Alda

#66. For me, I find that even though I've accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn't give me a sense of satisfaction.

Alan Alda

#67. My background is on the stage, so when I'd write movies, they'd be a lot like plays.

Alan Alda

#68. To do a musical takes a tremendous amount of energy because you have to act and sing at the same time. And everything has to be precise. Because you can't forget the lyrics because the band keeps playing, you know, and you're under a certain amount of pressure.

Alan Alda

#69. I made my first stage appearance when I was 6 months old.

Alan Alda

#70. 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. Not as somebody with a particular idea to sell, or something like that.

Alan Alda

#71. I sat next to a young woman on a plane once who bombarded me for five hours with how she had decided to be born again and so should I. I told her I was glad for her, but I hadn't used up being born the first time.

Alan Alda

#72. If you don't listen deeply, the connection won't take place ... [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.

Alan Alda

#73. I fix my grandchildren's computers.

Alan Alda

#74. 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.

Alan Alda

#75. When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool's sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it.

Alan Alda

#76. I used to read science fiction a lot, and I still like science fiction when it is a model of how we really are and to see ourselves from another perspective.

Alan Alda

#77. I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it. Maybe things would have gone differently for me in some ways if I had.

Alan Alda

#78. 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!

Alan Alda

#79. 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.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#81. Nothing important was ever accomplished without chutzpah. Columbus had chutzpah. The signers of the Declaration of Independence had chutzpah. Don't ever aim doubt at yourself. Laugh at yourself, but don't doubt yourself.

Alan Alda

#82. Whenever I think of how much pleasure I have interviewing scientists, I remember that they're having the real fun in actually being able to do the science.

Alan Alda

#83. I love oatmeal. To me, it's not boring. I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind - the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.

Alan Alda

#84. Blind dates are treacherous. You don't know who this person is. You wonder, 'Should I call my grandma during coffee to get out of this?'

Alan Alda

#85. I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can't put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn't be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.

Alan Alda

#86. Be brave enough to live creatively.

Alan Alda

#87. 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.

Alan Alda

#88. There are two things that I get a lot of pleasure from in my life, and that is, doing what I know how to do well - that really makes me happy. The other one, and probably an equal pleasure, is finding out how I can be helpful and then really being helpful.

Alan Alda

#89. 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.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#91. What's funny is that you can think you really value your life until you almost lose it.

Alan Alda

#92. I think I look better in a suit than a loincloth. So that may define some of the parts I play.

Alan Alda

#93. Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.

Alan Alda

#94. Raquel Welch, whom I've met but never kissed, once called the brain an erogenous zone.

Alan Alda

#95. Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

Alan Alda

#96. I read science, because to me, that's extremely exciting. It's like a great detective story, and it's happening right in front of us.

Alan Alda

#97. The one thing I think I've noticed about shows that are supposed to be funny on television is that they've sort of become routinized, so there's an awful lot of mannerisms and joke lines that are sort of there to trigger laughter, rather than give actors a chance to play a moment.

Alan Alda

#98. I know there's a creative side to artists to - pardon me - there's a creative side to scientists already, but there may be an artistic side, too, waiting to break free.

Alan Alda

#99. Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. 'M*A*S*H' is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.

Alan Alda

#100. 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.

Alan Alda