Top 70 Alan Alda Quotes

For me, I find that even though I’ve accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn’t give me a sense of satisfaction.

I’m most at home on the stage.

Usually, comedy shows only influence other comedy shows. ‘M*A*S*H’ is one of the few comedies that influenced dramatic shows as well.

I hated high school. It was a prison.

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?’

I have a strong preference for being alive.

I don’t miss directing at all, and I don’t miss screenwriting either because somebody’s always telling you to do something different.

Musicals are hard for me because I got thrown out of the glee club in high school, because I couldn’t sing in tune at the time. I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don’t exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

What heartens me is to see ’30 Rock’ on the air. It makes me laugh from my gut, which I really like to do.

I know there’s a creative side to artists to – pardon me – there’s a creative side to scientists already, but there may be an artistic side, too, waiting to break free.

When I was about ten years old, I gave my teacher an April Fool’s sandwich, which had a dead goldfish in it.

I used to be a Catholic. I left because I object to conversion by concussion. If you don’t agree with what they teach, you get clobbered over the head until you do. All that does is change the shape of the head.

I read science, because to me, that’s extremely exciting. It’s like a great detective story, and it’s happening right in front of us.

You can’t be aware of everything. You’d fall down the stairs if you were aware of every intricate thing involved in going down stairs.

All I’ve ever tried to do is play real people.

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

When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you’re interested in the arts, you can’t be interested in science.

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.

No matter how big the audience is going to be. I’m interested in doing things that are fun.

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.

Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.

I used to not want to die in any way but in my sleep when I was a young man. I’d like to die awake now, if possible, with people around me who love me.

The whole question of fiduciary responsibility is a very old concept. You could make a movie about someone making that rule at any point in history, and within a few months, it will turn out to be timely.

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.

I was brought up as a Catholic, and I’m no longer a Catholic. I don’t talk about my beliefs too much in public probably because I feel very strongly that it’s something personal – more than personal, it’s private.

We need to be more conversant with it because science is in our lives. It’s in everything. It’s in the food we eat. It’s in the air we breathe. It’s everywhere.

The meaning of life is life.

Really top-notch directors, I’ve often worked with them just to see how they work.

I must have interviewed 600 or 700 scientists all around the world.

My background is on the stage, so when I’d write movies, they’d be a lot like plays.

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

I really don’t like plays or movies that service propaganda.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

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.

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

What is beauty, anyway? It’s more than something pleasant looking. If it doesn’t stop us in our tracks and make us unable to move for a moment, unable to put into words what’s closing off the breath in our throats, then maybe it’s pretty, but it probably isn’t beauty.

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

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I’ve seen actors do that. But often it’s a mechanical transformation, which isn’t as interesting, and you’ve got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.

It’s a funny feeling to work with people who you consider your colleagues and to realize that they actually are young enough to be your children.

I made my first stage appearance when I was 6 months old.

I fix my grandchildren’s computers.

I’ve sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I’ve helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

I was always interested in figuring things out. I’d do experiments, like combining things I found around the house to see what would happen if I put them together.

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

If scientists can’t communicate with the public, with policy makers, with one another, the future is going to be held back. We’re not going to have the future that we could have.

I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.

On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters – words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.

It’s very important for us to see that science is done by people, not just brains but whole human beings, and sometimes at great cost.

I feel like every time a door is opened by science, suddenly there are a hundred doors that need to get opened. That’s what makes it an everlasting, interesting experience to go through.

I sat next to a young woman on a plane once who bombarded me for five hours with how she had decided to be born again and so should I. I told her I was glad for her, but I hadn’t used up being born the first time.

The one thing I think I’ve noticed about shows that are supposed to be funny on television is that they’ve sort of become routinized, so there’s an awful lot of mannerisms and joke lines that are sort of there to trigger laughter, rather than give actors a chance to play a moment.

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

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.

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.

I love to watch how scientists’ minds work.

I love oatmeal. To me, it’s not boring. I agree that ordinary oatmeal is very boring, but not the steel-cut Irish kind – the kind that pops in your mouth when you bite into it in little glorious bursts like a sort of gummy champagne.

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.

The thing is when you’re… well-enough known, you get asked to speak places, and they don’t really think about whether or not you’re qualified. They just want somebody that will be a drawing card for the audience. So it’s up to you to decide whether or not it’s foolish to get up and speak to these people.

I don’t watch that much TV, so I can’t compare one show to another. When I watch television, I watch people talking to one another usually or a science show where they show me microbes, you know. Microbes actually communicate quite a bit, and so there’s a lot of talking going on.

I’m greedy for that satisfaction of doing something hard and knowing that, even though I was afraid I couldn’t do it, that somehow I can deliver.

I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it. Maybe things would have gone differently for me in some ways if I had.

I’ve been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you’re not expecting it.