Alan Alda Quotes
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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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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 they called me up and asked me if I wanted to work with them, they just told me a little bit about the character and the story. They hadn't finished writing it yet. He's a very three-dimensional character, which is really what I've always looked forward to playing in any story I was in.
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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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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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There's plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.
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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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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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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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I always loved Sid Caesar and all the people on his program.
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Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are. They're supposed to be gigantic explosions and they're just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough you realize how important and powerful you are.
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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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The hardest thing for me about making movies, and that included 'M*A*S*H' because it was made like a movie, was starting and stopping.
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No matter how big the audience is going to be. I'm interested in doing things that are fun.
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Laugh at yourself, but don't ever aim your doubt at yourself.
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Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare - changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time - the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.
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I made my first stage appearance when I was 6 months old.
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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?
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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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All I've ever tried to do is play real people.
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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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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.
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I used to be an amateur inventor when I was a kid; I'm always inventing something.
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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.