Alan Alda Quotes


"Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname."
- Alan Alda
"Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart."
- Alan Alda
"I've never tried to manipulate my image."
- Alan Alda
"Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Life)

"Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you."
- Alan Alda
"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
(Related: Now, Question, Questions)

"I wouldn't live in California. All that sun makes you sterile."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Sun)

"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
(Related: Anger, People)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Love, People, Court, Fun, World)

"Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you."
- Alan Alda
"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?"
- Alan Alda
(Related: Actor, Being, Leading, Now, Theater)

"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
(Related: Comfort, Intuition, Wilderness, Will)

"If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Money)

"It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Famous)

"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
(Related: Character, Actor, Defeat, Fun, Want)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Life, Impression, Interest, Trying)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Life, Time, Ideas)

"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
(Related: People, World)

"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
(Related: Doubt)

"I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Home, Time, First, Months, Old)

"When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another."
- Alan Alda
(Related: People, Killing)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Work, Hard work, Risk, Will)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Business, Selling, Now, School, Want)

"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
(Related: Change, Advice, Uncertainty)

"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
(Related: Being, Existence, Goodness, Man, Woman, World)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Comfort, Intuition, Wilderness)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Time, Facts, Feeling, Thinking, Years)

"My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Mother, Father)

"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."
- Alan Alda
(Related: Light, Windows, World)