I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.
— Michael J. Fox
So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.
I still play hockey every now and then, and I still golf. But my biggest exercise is walking my big dog in the park every day.
I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.
When you're a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you're a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.
The only thing worse than an opportunity you don't deserve is blowing an opportunity.
Pain is temporary, film is forever.
I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.
Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.
The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says 'you're cute', I'll say thank you, but I appreciate it much more when the other one says 'you make me laugh so much'.
If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there's not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.
I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.
I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.
Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?
My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.
I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.
I have a remarkably normal life.
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
I'm kind of private and I keep things inside a lot, but it's been so wonderful to realize that people care about you in a very deep way and that there is some bond between an actor and his audience. I don't even know how to describe that feeling.
Family is not an important thing. It's everything.
I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.
The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.
I didn't want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.
I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.
One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.
But the key to our marriage is the capacity to give each other a break. And to realize that it's not how our similarities work together; it's how our differences work together.
I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people's lives through advocacy and through supporting research - that's the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it's certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.
I see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.
I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.
Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.
I can't always control my body the way I want to, and I can't control when I feel good or when I don't. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.
Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.
In my 50s I'll be dancing at my children's weddings.
I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.
Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.
After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.
You've probably read in People that I'm a nice guy - but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson's, I wanted to kill him.
What other people think about me is not my business.
The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.
