Top 25 Tim Daly Quotes

‘Wings’ offered me the rare opportunity to be a full-time dad and a working actor for eight years.

It’s an actor’s job to play all the human conditions – light, dark, and medium.

I appreciate all the devices the Windows people are coming up with, but the operating system… I just want to smash it.

Thank God for acupuncture. It’s been around for 2000 years. It’s not going anyplace and people use it all of the time for a variety of cures and to avoid illnesses.

I love babies – I love being with them. As for acting with them, it’s kind of hard because they don’t know how to act.

I am a member of the human race. There’s a certain irony about the cyberworld. You don’t know who is talking to you, if it’s a machine, so I tend to try to reach out to those fellow humans.

What can I say: I got started on the whole wife-and-kids thing at a young age. I had my kids while I was in utero.

I didn’t dream of being in television or film. But then I got married pretty young and had children, and I wanted to feed the children, so I worked a lot of film and television.

I don’t think I gave ‘Wings’ its due. I was young. I wanted to light the world on fire.

‘Wings’ was a blessing, but it was also very difficult. Whenever you do situation comedy, no matter how excellent the execution – and we had a great cast and great writers – but the format is somewhat limited.

My natural self is John Goodman. If I relaxed, I’d be him.

I have this burgeoning reputation for playing a scumbag.

I love getting on the subway because you get on the car, and you see the entire human race represented in any given subway car.

‘Superman’ was a total accident. The producers of the animated series were having a hard time finding someone to read the character. I was brought in through a connection and, I think, out of desperation.

I never had the desire to get in front of the camera. It never occurred to me! I always thought I’d be a theater actor.

I’m probably my own harshest critic. If I get a hundred good reviews and one really bad one, it’s that one out of a hundred that I remember. I think we actors are hard on ourselves, and I don’t know why that is.

I like bothering people and stirring things up.

I look for characters that offer me opportunities to explore some aspect of the human condition. I think a lot of actors would say that and would look for that. I’ve been lucky enough to find projects that let me do that.

For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder – if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There’s about five years of my life that’s virtually gone. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don’t want to dredge up those things.

I can’t help teasing people. That’s the way that I am, and I hope that nobody takes it too personally.

The biggest compliment I can ever get as an actor is to have someone say, ‘We didn’t recognize you.’

It’s not like I walk around being Superman in real life. But when you read the script and put yourself in the position that Superman is in – I mean, he’s always saving the planet, for God’s sake. When you realize that, it’s not difficult to take the gravitas of the situation and make your voice do what it needs to do.

I get offered a lot of parts where I want to say, ‘Why don’t you just hire a model? Don’t hire an actor.’ I’m trying to convince people I’m a real actor, not some mannequin.

I grew up with actors, so I never thought of them as anything but human – sort of horribly, inextricably human.