Alda Quotes

#1. Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

#2. I did a Broadway show with Alan Alda and how much money can Alan Alda have.

Alice Barrett

#3. I'm pretty sure I'm a doppelganger for Alan Alda. I'm a trannie; I'm a man.

Megan Fox

#4. Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

Kathleen Parker

#5. You're in a scene with Laura Linney or Oliver Platt or John Hickey or Alan Alda and these amazing actors and actresses, and you're like, 'Oh my God, I haven't even started; I'm nothing compared to these people!'

Gabriel Basso

#6. Alan Alda is loved not because he's sensitive, but because he's successful and sensitive.

Warren Farrell

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#12. If you know what you're looking for, that's all you'll get - what's previously known. But when you're open to what's possible, you get something new - that's creativity.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I don't like Paradise,
As they probably don't have obsessions there.

Alda Merini

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

Alan Alda

#19. 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

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

Alan Alda

#21. If scientists could communicate more in their own voices - in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary - would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?

Alan Alda

#22. 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

#23. At times 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.

Alan Alda

#24. I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.

Alan Alda

#25. It's very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost.

Alan Alda

#26. Any play is hard to write, and plays are getting harder and harder to get on the stage.

Alan Alda

#27. 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

#28. I was brought up as a Catholic, and I'm no longer a Catholic. I don't talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it's something personal - more than personal, it's private.

Alan Alda

#29. I had always wondered why people wanted to be rich and famous. If you could be rich and anonymous, that would be fun. To be famous and not rich, the way we were, was the least fun. It takes time and effort to be famous, and if they offer you fame without the money, don't take it. It's a scam.

Alan Alda

#30. 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

#31. 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.

Alan Alda

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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.

Alan Alda

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Alan Alda

#38. There's plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.

Alan Alda

#39. I'm condemned by some inner compulsion to think about the daily rituals of my life. I have a low grade fever for improving myself in many ways, including everyday tasks.

Alan Alda

#40. 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.

Alan Alda

#41. I have a strong preference for being alive.

Alan Alda

#42. 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

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

Alan Alda

#44. 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.

Alan Alda

#45. I've been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you're not expecting it.

Alan Alda

#46. 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

#47. I always loved Sid Caesar and all the people on his program.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#49. 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

#50. 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. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

Alan Alda

#51. I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

Alan Alda

#52. 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

#53. I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#55. On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters - words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#57. 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.

Alan Alda

#58. 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

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

Alan Alda

#60. 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

#61. When your kids turn 13, an alien being invades their bodies and doesn't leave until they're 20.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#63. 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

#64. 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?

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#66. 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.

Alan Alda

#67. Insanity is just a state of mind.

Alan Alda

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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.

Alan Alda

#71. '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.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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.

Alan Alda

#78. 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

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#81. 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

#82. My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#85. 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

#86. 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

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

Alan Alda

#88. Anesthetized by youth, I missed it.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. The whole question of fiduciary responsibility is a very old concept. You could make a movie about someone making that rule at any point in history, and within a few months, it will turn out to be timely.

Alan Alda

#94. 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

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

Alan Alda

#96. I love technology.

Alan Alda

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

Alan Alda

#98. 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

#99. 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

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

Alan Alda