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

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

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

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

I’ve never tried to manipulate my image.
Alan Alda

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

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

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

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

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

‘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

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

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

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

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.
Alan Alda

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.
Alan Alda

I don’t really worry about the size of the part much any more. It’s nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there’s something playable there, and if it’s interesting to do, then that’s nice.
Alan Alda

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

No, I never thought about my image. It interests me that there are people who do, that they seem to be methodical about it.
Alan Alda

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.
Alan Alda

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what’s personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn’t ring true.
Alan Alda

And I think belief is one of those things that comes to people in their own way. And just because I believe in something doesn’t mean I think that you should.
Alan Alda

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.
Alan Alda

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.
Alan Alda

Kids are natural scientists.
Alan Alda