Quotes from Alan Alda

Listening is being able to be changed by the other person.

Real conversation can't happen if listening is just my waiting for you to finish talking.

If another player creates a bump in the sculpture, you don't ignore it; you acknowledge the bump and build on it. Communication doesn't take place because you tell somebody something. It takes place when you observe them closely and track their ability to follow you. Like making a sculpture out of space, communication is a group experience.

I didn't know it, but what I was really looking for was compassion. Not consciously of course. I didn't consciously want to become compassionate. Who in his right mind would give up his place at the center of the universe? Compassion is scary. If you open up too much to people, they have power over you and make you i things for them. Better to keep them at a distance ...

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I'm willing to let them change me, something happens between us that's more interesting than monologues. Like so much of what I learned in the theater, this turned out how life works, too.

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.

You picture an audience and think, What are they already aware of? Where should I start? How deep should I go? What are they actually eager to know? If I start too far in, will I be using concepts they don't really understand?

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

Be brave enough to live creatively. 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. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful: Yourself.

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.

I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Eventually, I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I'm willing to let them change me, something happens between us that's more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.

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

When people are laughing, they're generally not killing one another.

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.

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

During the first day, curious at having outsiders among them, a long stream of inmates came over and talked with me. Remarkably, according to what they told me, nearly every inmate in the prison didn't do it. Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

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.

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.

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

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.

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. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

It isn't necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It's only necessary to be rich.

Loneliness is everything it's cracked up to be.