Popularity: 1
Vote:   | A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | A talented writer can write women, men, dogs, pigs. They can write old people, young people. Does a writer have to be insane to write the part of someone insane? I know he has to be insane to want to be a writer, but that isn't the point. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | America is terrified of the passage of time. Prozac Nation. Land of Face Lifts. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | As children get older, they are supposed to gradually stand more and more on their own and eventually completely leave the nest. My boys are definitely starting to do that. Soon I might actually go on a date. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | At 200 pounds, with a 17-inch neck, a resting pulse of 78, a bench press of 200 pounds, I was very much indeed a normal, All-American male. I carried my sickness within. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Back in 1977, Larson was in the middle of preparing a megabuck blockbuster sci-fi project for Universal and ABC Television. Nothing like it had ever been done before on television. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Be very clear as to what your dream is. Nowadays it is fairly certain that 90 percent of all actors really just want to be rich and famous as the solution to all that ails. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Cassavetes would have been pleased with me. Truffaut, too, I think. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Change is good. And in fact unavoidable. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Children who cling to parents or who don't want to leave home are stunted in their emotional, psychological growth. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Children... are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God's children. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Dancing. my favorite social event. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Dialogue is my forte. Whether that is because I am an actor or merely talented in that regard I have no idea. Nor do I care. When I write, I always feel like I am just taking dictation-following the characters around and writing down what they say. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Festivals today are driven by female perspective. My film is about heterosexual men over 40. And it was very much alone. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Films must all have the same structure. All of this to guarantee box office bonanza, which of course it never does, but that's another discussion entirely. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | For the first time in my mostly rural life I'm in a city with health-food restaurants! Trusting the printed word, I'm binging indiscriminately on anything on the menu. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | For thousands of sick and dying people all over the country, cast out of hospitals with their individual predictions of only months left on this planet, Boston was a last hope, a Mecca. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | From dear, dear Gloria Swanson, I learned how to live long, happy and free of health problems. I owe her my life. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | From Fred Astaire I learned discipline and hard work. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | From Maya Angelou I began to believe that I, too, someday, could be a writer, and I also learned how tortuous it can be to be in possession of a unique voice. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | From the very beginning, the primary appeal of macrobiotics for me was that it was something I could try by myself. I had never sought, nor wanted... help in trying to understand the principles of yin and yang. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Generally speaking, actors are allowed NO input. Actors are dumb. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Harrison Ford was pretty content as a carpenter who thought it would be nice to work on TV and ended up being the biggest film star in the history of cinema. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Hollywood today is ALL about being consistent. All thinking in mainstream film business takes place in ONE BOX. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Hollywood... a city I was to come back to time and again, in sickness and in health, in success and in failure, with anticipation and with dread. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Hollywood... damn well won't hire a writer over 40 unless he made his mark when he was under 30. America worships youth. It is reflected everywhere. And because wisdom can ONLY come with age, America is a very immature, unwise country. As reflected in its films. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I also knew that, although infinitely slower, the only real path to personal health and happiness was through my own slow and painful understanding. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I ALWAYS enjoy myself. And if I didn't enjoy myself in this experience, I should be locked away for lack of gratitude. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I am a better actor now than at any time in my life. And haven't worked for seven years! |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I am not simply an actor, but also have written books and now directed/written a film, I have some people that are interested in that aspect of my experience. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I am very abnormal... But it wasn't very long ago that I wasn't so abnormal. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am very much a person who enjoys mornings as much as evenings. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I am very willing to share whatever I know or feel I know about finding some serenity in this lifetime. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I believe that the first 8 years are most important and the time in a child's life when parents must be absolutely and completely present. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I bought this cabin as a vacation escape some 20 years ago. I knew one day I'd make this my permanent home, a place to raise my children. I feel blessed, I've managed to make my dream come true. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I can still fit into my Battlestar Galactica costume! |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I can tell the difference between something filmed, like we did back then, and the computer-generated effects of today. Ours looked real on film because they were real. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I consider my life one long string of failures, but all of the failure has made me more grateful to be alive, more joyous in the moment and more appreciative for every day I have. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I encourage people to be happy in the face of sadness. To realize that joy is contagious and that they have within themsleves, that we all do, all we need to be fully realized individuals. That we don't need gurus, experts, doctors, preachers, psychiatrists... that they are all unnecessary. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I enjoy writing nonfiction the most because one is limited only by one's imagination. Autobiography is tough. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I found Galactica fans, generally, to be much more intelligent and well-read than the average TV fan. They're supremely knowledgeable about the show. It makes an old guy feel great to talk with people who appreciate you for something you did so long ago. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I had a Dixieland jazz band in high school and college and dreamed of becoming Tommy Dorsey or better yet, Kid Ory, my hero! Too many interests, too little time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I have my routine. I'm running 3 or 4 miles a day. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I live very much, try to, in the moment, and find whichever moment I'm in to be the best. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I loved sitting on my veranda sipping quality scotch, puffing a Cuban cigar and watching Cuba on the horizon, or the oceanic vista. Did this late in the evenings many times. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I loved Starbuck smoking cigars, so I kept puffing. and then, when the show began airing, every girl in America sent me a box of cigars, and the network suddenly thought that was wonderful. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I maintain you can make a film/TV star out of a can of sardines. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I never get involved with the ladies I work with. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I personally don't think anybody should be allowed to write a screenplay UNTIL they are over 40. It used to be don't trust anyone over 30; now it is don't hire anyone over 30. I wish I were joking. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I remember all of the beautiful women I met on Battlestar Galactica. Some of them I got to know during this very interesting, frenetic time. I fell in love daily! It was a very intoxicating time for a small-town lad from Montana. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I wanted to be Anthony Hopkins and ended up being neither a film star nor having a career on the stage. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was an actor. I wanted to act. But... I didn't want to be a movie star. Never had wanted to be a movie star. I was so naive as to assume that anyone who knew me would know that went without saying. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was being paid scale plus 10, and people wondered why I was driving a used car, when I was such a big TV star! But I have no regrets. Doing Battlestar Galactica was a great experience. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I was influenced by James Garner, who was doing Rockford Files at the time. I was a big fan of his, and I played Starbuck like a reluctant hero. That's more fun than playing the straight-arrow kind of hero, which I find boring. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I was playing a small part in my first Broadway play, Abelard and Heloise, starring Diana Rigg and Keith Michel. The production was in Los Angeles for a six-week, pre-Broadway tryout at the Ahmanson Theatre. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was the final word on everything. I wrote and directed. Complete cast approval. Every piece of music. Every edit. Which means I pissed off a lot of people. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I went from being a big TV star on the lot, with my own parking space, my own table in the commissary, to a complete nobody! When I went to get my stuff, they wouldn't let me on the lot. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I wouldn't refuse stardom, recognition, acclaim. I had no axe to grind either way... I wasn't wishing I was somewhere else, somebody else, richer or more famous. I was happy and secure with who I was, what I was and where I was. I didn't have to have what they all had. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm a classic example of what can happen if you follow your inner voice. I was cursed with interests and some talent in many different areas. It confuses people. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm the worst person to ask about how to get noticed. It took me 25 years. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I've always been interested in makeup. I had just come from New York when I got this job, so as a stage actor, I was used to doing my own makeup. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | If I could play a convincing black transvestite, that would mean I was one hell of an actor. Nowadays I'd be marched against by the black political groups, the transvestites and God knows who else. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | If I were to describe my thinkning about this, I would say I would think of myself as the ocean, and people are welcome to stand on my shores and gaze and listen and take from it what they will. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | If my company was pleasant, it was only because of that and the genuine enjoyment it allowed me as a pauper amoung princes. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If we wait until our lives are free from sorrow or difficulty, then we wait forever. And miss the entire point. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | If you have talent as a screenwriter, it will out. Nothing succeeds like perseverance. Never give up. Anyway, life never turns out the way you imagine, dream or plan it to. Or hadn't you heard? |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | If you want to have great success, you'd better give them what they want, but so be it. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | If you want to have something to say about the voice or vision of a film, go to Harvard Business School. Become a Studio Exec. But don't become a writer. Or director, for that matter. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | If you write a truly original film, people will tell you it isn't a real screenplay... 'cuz they've all gone to the same screenplay writing classes and KNOW what one is supposed to look like. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | IMAGE is king. NOT the written word. The written word in films died with the success of E.T. Spielberg killed the written word in films because he is a genius at what he does, and what he does is make films based on a childhood in front of the TV. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | In many ways I wish I wasn't an actor dragging around the baggage from being one so that I could just devote my energies to encouraging people to find their true selves. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | In their arrogance, ABC wanted a number-one show. They wouldn't accept losing that time slot. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | It has not been a smooth ride. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is a good motive, fame and money, as it is tangible and measurable. Being an artist is neither measurable nor tangible and certainly not a way to become rich. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It is a sign of health to be able to get up and let go and dance one's heart and soul out... I dance in my cabin here in Montana many mornings while cooking breakfast. Did it this morning to a Roy Oribson CD. What a way to start the day. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | It is all about marketing; that is where the real craft comes in. The best actors do not necessarily become the biggest stars. And vice versa. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It is marketing that makes films popular. Cross-marketing. Selling movies with hamburgers and Coke. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | It takes great technique, tremendous discipline and energy and practice, and damn few are capable. Art is confidence. Technique makes it possible to achieve artistic greatness, but doesn't guarantee it. The great piano artists are not the ones who are best playing Clementi exercises. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | It's strange. I am a little famous and yet I preach anonymnity; I stand up and lecture, yet tell people to listen to no one but them selves. Paradox. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Life has never been easy. Nor is it meant to be. It is a matter of being joyous in the face of sorrow. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | LIFE: My favorite occupation. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Many people are shy when it comes to getting out on a dance floor. Dancing is an activity that... reveals your inner self, whether you like it, or know it, or not. It is hard to fake it on a dance floor. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Meat is bad. Sugar is bad. Chemicals are bad, bad, bad! I wanna be good, good good. So I will just stop eating those evil things. What an ego! I am always amazed that I did survive. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Months of working on The A-Team had not made me happier or more contented. It has challenged my ability to remain so. The hours of waiting, talking and thinking on the set needed to be balanced. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Movies are movies, television is television. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My children are with me morning and night and weekends. Constantly. They are my complete priority, have been, and so they aren't suffering from lack of being with dad. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | My favorite thing is to be alone in a room with a blank paper in front of me and the time to fill it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | My films went to numerous film festivals. I was stunned at how shallow the films were and how much alike. And how politically correct. Not only did you have to be young, but also too a member of some minority. Teenage angst, gay, lesbian, any film about a woman as a victim. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My son flipped. He loved it. He's 9 now, but he still loves reptiles. To this day, he's so proud that his Dad turned into a snake. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | On the surface, Starbuck was a womanizer, a partying kind of guy. He would rather play cards and be with the girls than fight the Cylons. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | One can have a 10-year-old tumor languishing in one's prostate and pass a physical with flying colors. I know. It happened to me time and again, every fall, as I had my physical for college football. And again in 1969, when I passed my pre-induction physical for the military. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Originally, Starbuck was a rather small role. The show was supposed to be about Adam and his son. Starbuck was just one of the fighter pilots. I made several actor's choices early on, to bring more dimension to him, and it worked. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Over the years I've had many agents, too many to remember. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | People think surviving cancer is tough, or surviving a divorce, but NOTHING compares with fighting with American Culture when you want to raise your kids free of junk food. Read Junk Food Nation. A great book. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Questions about acting are difficult. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Read Shakespeare. He wrote EVERYTHING and better than anybody. He'd be in a lot of trouble today. It is sad, but today Sir Laurence Olivier would not be allowed to play Othello. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Sadly, there are no rules by which an actor learns his craft. Would that it were that easy. I spent four years studying acting in college and another two years in English Classical training and ended up working a lot on TV. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Someday I would love to publish the hundreds of letters I've received from people around the world, telling me their stories of having stumbled into my book and taking it to heart, to soul, and recovering from their illness. Amazing stories of recovery. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Starbuck was a good guy who had trouble growing up. I take a great deal of pride in being responsible for making him the success that he was. Frankly, I didn't know if people would like him. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | That's Hollywood. Boom! From star to forgotten actor. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | That's the network mentality. They're always chasing the polls, trying to second-guess what the people like. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | The American medical community clasped me to its fiducial bosom with its diagnosis of a tumor in my prostate gland. I wouldn't have it any other way. Remove any of these items from my physical/psychological resume, and you diminish in quantum leaps the richness of the fabric that has been my life. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The beef, venison and elk vibrations of my first 22 years were still very much controlling the nature of my day-to-day activities. Arthritis was my morning wake-up call, mood swings between ecstasy and despair my daily state of mind, and Scotch my release from it all. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | The best things in life are usually difficult. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The best way to go from zero to 100 in showbiz is to write a screenplay so good-explainable in 25 words or less-that everyone wants it. And if you are over 40, send your younger brother, sister or your kid to take the meeting. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | The idea of turning into a reptile fascinated me. Other than that, my role was kind of... well, I don't want to say boring, but rather ordinary. I was playing the helpless victim. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The media destroyed the show with all the hype. All the press worked against us. We didn't become the Number 1 show in the country ,and the critics destroyed us. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The neurosis of all this ageism is that Harrison Ford, Eastwood, Redford, Newman, etc., etc., have been playing heartthrobs until they need more filters than a pack of Camels. And their girlfriends are in their 20s. But being a Movie Star changes all the rules. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The only difference from one $100 million budget film to another is which of the 12 box stars are getting $20 million to be in it. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The space genre is timeless. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The trouble with most stage plays nowadays is they are written by people who grew up not reading or seeing the great theatrical literature of the day, but watching network TV. And so they are more like TV sitcoms than stage plays. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | There is a divine moment in our lives when we all become one. It's called procreation, and it is reborn, continually and forever. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There isn't a place on Earth with the amount of beautiful ladies as LA. When you're young and starring in a successful TV show and playing the ladies' man-well, it's a good thing the show was cancelled, or I would have been old before my time! |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | There were constant comparisons. Galactica was considered a bastard child that pretended to be like Star Wars. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Time is money, as they say, and it was never more apropos than on a television show, where a minute is worth about $200! |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Today I spend more time making music than I do writing. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Unlike today, where the visuals are all computer-generated, we did ours on film. They had a beautiful miniature of the Galactica and all these little Viper models, and the result was fantastic. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We are all vegetarians here, and except for a mountain lion that's been hanging around and killed our dog, we don't have a care in the world. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We had many intellectuals and industry people who looked down on us, as if it were beneath them to even watch us. Nowadays, those comparisons aren't made. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We live in an age of experts, and if you are a TV star... it is difficult, if not impossible, to gain respect as a writer of the kind of books I've written or the kind of film I wrote and directed. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | We need to continually look within ourselves. Contemplate our inner being and find our own unique voice and then learn to heed it and we will then have the life experience we deserve. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We played on Sunday nights opposite All in the Family. We were supposed to knock off All in the Family. Well, we didn't. They had a different audience and besides, it's a classic. So in the network's view, we were a failure, even thought we were in the Top 20. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When I was a young actor... the more different you were from the part you played, the more talent it reflected. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | With my introduction to Miss Swanson and macrobiotics, I had become obsessed. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | You can never tire, never wilt-and become half-tyrant, half-psychiatrist, half-madman, and half-dead to get it the way you want. Which I did. And it almost killed me. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | You can't leave civilization behind entirely. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You could write a book on why Galactica was cancelled. It was an enormously difficult show to launch. |