Quotes from Henry Winkler

I was allergic to school. I was completely befuddled by school. I was trying so hard, but I couldn't succeed. I took geometry for four years, the same course over and over again, and I did not graduate with my senior class. I finally passed geometry after doing summer school, and eventually, I graduated.

If the country is going to be great, everybody has a gift, and I tell every child I meet, whether they have asked me or not, 'You have greatness inside you, and your job is to figure out what that is, dig it out, and give it to the world. Because the world needs everything, every one of you.'

I live by two words: tenacity and gratitude.

Producing is the hardest of the three because there is almost no closure. Every time you solve a problem, another one pops up. Directing is second, and acting is the most fun.

Wes Craven is a wonderful friend, and we had a really good time together.

Comedy isn't just timing; it's about rooting out the funny in the real. You just bend reality to the left a little.

If you clear your mind, you can fill it with your character. If it is cluttered, if it is anxious, if you're thinking about your date, about your dinner, about filling your refrigerator, there's no room. There's no room for the character you're trying to build.

To me acting is like a jigsaw puzzle. The jigsaw puzzle is of the sky and all the pieces are blue. Out of this you have to create a human being and put it together.

I have had teachers who were brutal. If you look up 'brutal' in a dictionary, you will see their names. And I think that it's under the guise of wanting to change the actor's habit - wanting to break bad habits and replace them with brand-new ones you can use for the rest of your career.

You cannot represent cool. You've got to be cool. You've got to be authentic. I think, after all these years, that is how I define cool. It is being authentic. That is powerful.

When I was a freshman at Yale, one teacher brought me up after class and said, 'You're trying to undermine my class.' And I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, I'm going to be kicked out of school on the first week.' Not only do I not have a sense of self, I don't even know what she's talking about. I don't even know how to undermine anything.

When you love what you do, then you're talking to one of the luckiest guys on the face of the earth.

My Aunt Erna was smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1939, alive, in a coffin with a spider plant at her feet. When I moved to Los Angeles from New York City in 1974 for 'Happy Days,' I took a cutting with me.

I always catch and release and don't even eat trout. I think they are so majestic. I won't eat a trout even in a restaurant. They are beautiful and so much fun, and they give me such joy to catch them that it is my pleasure to take a picture with them, give them a kiss, sign a laminated autographed picture and put it in their mouth.

My soul lives in Montana. It's where I fly-fish for trout.

I have been known to catch sixty trout in one day.

I rode it once, which was up the driveway in the opening credits of the show. I didn't know how to stop it. I actually nearly killed the director of photography, and I smashed into the sound truck.

All children know when something is wrong and they can't understand something - they never need someone to tell them they're stupid. They need help in solving the problem.

You see, I don't know how to ride a motorcycle, actually.

It's truly unbelievable, the tenacity of life.

That problem has been going on since men and women and their children moved from the plains and into caves. How many times have you heard Howard Cunningham talking to Marian about shopping? Too many.

As we sit here and idly chat, there are woman, female human beings, rolling around in strange beds with strange men, and we are making money from that.

I do most of my work with kids. They are the very foundation of our future. We are so incredibly disrespectful to them in America in every way because they can't vote.

It is the parent's job to see how their child learns and to make sure that the children's self confidence is buoyed at all times, or they will plummet like a stone.