Alan Alda Quotes
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The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.
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For humans, flying isn't magic, it's physics.
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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.
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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.
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I don't miss directing at all, and I don't miss screenwriting either because somebody's always telling you to do something different.
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I love the idea of being out there with little or no net.
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'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.
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What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognize their names and faces but know nothing else about them? Why do we care what they think, what they wear, what they eat?
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It's not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It's a picture of somebody trying to figure things out. I'm not trying to create some impression about myself. That doesn't interest me.
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Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.
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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.
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There's plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.
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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.
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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.
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I always loved Sid Caesar and all the people on his program.
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There is a wonderful feeling of power when you're a director, but I don't think I need that, and I'm OK without it.
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The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.
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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?'
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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.
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When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool's sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anyone I know who's almost died has come out of it, at least for a while, looking at things differently.