Alan Alda - biography

Biography

Alan Alda is best-known for the following films:

Alan Alda Quotes

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

“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?”

“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.”

“Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich.”

“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.”

“Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.”

“The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that.”

“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.”

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

“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’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.”

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

“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.”

“No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I wouldn’t live in California. All that sun makes you sterile.”

“I’ve never tried to manipulate my image.”

“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.”

“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.”

Filmography

The Film Director

Alan Alda directed the following films:
The Four Seasons (1981)
Sweet Liberty (1986)
A New Life (1988)
Betsy’s Wedding (1990)

The Actor