Alan Alda Quotes (42 Quotes)


    Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once and a while, or the light won't come in.

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

    You wouldn't want to be called a sell-out by selling a product. Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

    I'm in the real world, some people try to steal from me, and I stop them, frequently, take them to court. I love a good lawsuit. It's fun.

    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.


    Be brave enough to live creatively. 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. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful yourself.

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

    Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you.

    I've never tried to manipulate my image.

    You'd better take that wine back. It's a little off.

    My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.

    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.

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

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

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

    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.

    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.

    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.

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

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

    I've been nominated twice before as actor in a leading part. Now I'm nominated as actor in a supporting part. If I don't win, I'll just wait until I'm nominated for being in the theater during the show. Do they have one like that?

    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.

    When the greatest hero in the history of my party, Abraham Lincoln, debated, he didn't need any rules, ... We could junk the rules.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

    Alda concluded by invoking the words with which Jennings had closed his final broadcast in April, when he informed viewers of his illness. Dear friend, ... Thanks. And good night.

    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.

    For nearly a quarter of a century three men in this country were anchors in more ways than one. At a time so many things in our country were changing, they were solid.

    Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.

    He knew there was something wrong, but there wasn't even a name for it in those days.

    I think the audience was aware that even when it was farcical, there was the sense that at some level this was about real experience.

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

    I love the idea of being out there with little or no net,

    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.

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

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


    More Alan Alda Quotations (Based on Topics)


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