'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
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've never tried to manipulate my image.
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.
Here's my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they're fair with you.
Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.
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.
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.
When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.
My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.
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.
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?
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.
Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.
After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can't bring back anything to life.
I wouldn't live in California. All that sun makes you sterile.
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.
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.
If I can't get the girl, at least give me more money.
I'm most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.
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.
Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
Be fair with others, but then keep after them until they're fair with you.
It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.
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.
