Fred Melamed Quotes

#1. Well, because I have twin seven-year-old boys, I enjoy the gift giving stuff a great deal. We do both Hanukkah and Christmas, so it is a costly, though extremely pleasing proposition.

Fred Melamed

#2. In general, I'm always interested in characters who have kind of extreme aspects to them, who are in some ways larger than typical people.

Fred Melamed

#3. The word "hedonistic" to me means pleasure above all else. My pleasure above all else.

Fred Melamed

#4. I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

Fred Melamed

#5. I have two young children with autism. What could they have ever done to deserve that? What kind of a God allows the innocent to suffer? It's a mystery. Yet still, I believe in God.

Fred Melamed

#6. I always did plays in school because I thought it was fun, but it just never occurred to me as a thing to do.

Fred Melamed

#7. We must agree to live in this world, with all that is unfair about it, without knowing why, if we wish to have a God in our lives.

Fred Melamed

#8. Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.

Fred Melamed

#9. It's funny, but three of my early films were with Liam Neeson, before Liam Neeson was a big star.

Fred Melamed

#10. I have a secret aspiration to be considered for a part where it doesn't matter what you look like to play it.

Fred Melamed

#11. I'd always admired Diane Keaton, but I'd never met her.

Fred Melamed

#12. I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.

Fred Melamed

#13. I don't really know of the Jewish tradition of comedy, only the Jewish tradition of not keeping your mouth shut. Complaining about all that is hard, unfair or ridiculous in life-having strong feelings, and not being able to suppress them. That, to me, is Jewish.

Fred Melamed

#14. It probably goes without saying that I enjoy the potato pancakes, delicious hams and so forth that maddeningly turn up at this time of year.

Fred Melamed

#15. I've always thought that, in a sense, the more specific and sometimes even the smaller the world of a movie is, the more universal it is.

Fred Melamed

#16. I haven't appeared on stage in quite a long time and I don't have any immediate plans to do so, but I'm always interested in going back.

Fred Melamed

#17. In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.

Fred Melamed