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I try to find out what there is in the character that in a way, you can't put into words. If I could put it into words, then it wouldn't be a performance. And if I do put it into words, as I play it, I start to get boxed in by those words.

Alan Alda

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Alan Alda
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: January 28
Actor
Film Actor
Film Director
Podcaster
Screenwriter
Television Actor
Television Director
Television Presenter
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo
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Words
Character
Find
Play
Boxed
Trying
Performance
Way
Performances
Wouldn

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I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I've thought, 'Why don't I just act on that impulse?' But then, I've never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I've never hit anybody for fun.
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Almost everybody that's well-known gets tagged with a nickname.
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Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.
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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.
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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.
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When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.
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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.
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Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.
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Testosterone Poisoning: … Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’
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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?
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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.
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War is war and Hell is hell, and if you ask me, War is a lot worse.
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Be brave enough to live creatively.
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In 2003, I almost died of an intestinal blockage when I was on a mountain in Chile, filming a segment for 'Scientific American Frontiers.'
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life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it ... it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it's as though you aren't there.
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There's plenty of money to be had. But you also lose your soul.
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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.
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Insanity is just a state of mind.
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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.
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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.
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