Alan Alda Quotes

Kids are natural scientists.

I play tennis non-obsessively. I seem to beat people I play a lot or half the time, so I guess I gravitate to people who are as bad as I am.

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

Being mystified is a good beginning, because you won't do what you've done before.

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.

Awards can give you a tremendous amount of encouragement to keep getting better, no matter how young or old you are.

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.

We're highly social animals - I'm told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

There's plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.

Loneliness is everything it's cracked up to be.

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.

Some of the greatest things, as I understand, they have come about by serendipity, the greatest discoveries

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.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.

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

I've played a murderer, so certainly I think I can play a Republican.

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.

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

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.

As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time.

I'm in this wonderful position where I can do what interests me. And whatever comes along that interests me, I do. The rest of the time I bother scientists about communicating.

If you know what you're looking for, that's all you'll get - what's previously known. But when you're open to what's possible, you get something new - that's creativity.

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

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

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.

[B]egin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.

At times 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.

How can I be so captured by my own imagination that I can truly connect both to the person I'm playing and to the person I'm playing wi

Aren't we lucky to be us?

I fix my grandchildren's computers.

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.

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

I would like to know that when I read the paper in the morning, it's telling me something that actually happened, and I think the vast majority of journalists want the same thing.