Michael J. Fox Quotes

1. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.


2. My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.

3. If you were to rush into this room right now and announce that you had struck a deal - with God, Allah, Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Bill Gates, whomever - in which the ten years since my diagnosis could be magically taken away, traded in for ten more years as the person I was before - I would, without a moment's hesitation, tell you to take a hike.

4. You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

5. But the key to our marriage is the capacity to give each other a break. And to realize that it's not how our similarities work together; it's how our differences work together.

6. The only thing worse than an opportunity you don't deserve is blowing an opportunity.

7. Family is not an important thing. It's everything.

8. The only thing that separates any one of us from excellence is fear and the opposite of fear is faith.







9. Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.

10. I believe that the majority of times the scale tilts toward the good. It's this amazing thing that rolls on and if we get in the flow of it, that's God. And if we fight it, if we swim the other way, we're swimming away from the purest expression of this life.

11. When you're a short actor you stand on apple boxes, you walk on a ramp. When you're a short star everybody else walks in a ditch.

12. I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day - it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.

13. Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it.


14. Christopher Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said: "Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us."

15. The thing that brings people to wail at a wall, or face Mecca, or to go to church, is a search for that feeling of purity.

16. If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're pissing all over today.



17. I don't subscribe to any particular orthodoxy, so I don't define it and I don't put it into a definition that other people have to conform to. An expression I always use is, there is a God and it's not me.

18. I mean, I enjoy my work as an actor. But to make a difference in people's lives through advocacy and through supporting research - that's the kind of privilege that few people will get, and it's certainly bigger than being on TV every Thursday for half an hour.

19. The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.




20. I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.

21. I didn't want to do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.






22. I might have skipped class, but I didn't miss any lessons.

23. I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.

24. My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.

25. Some of the best friends you'll ever meet in your life, you'll meet though your children - mothers and fathers of their friends, parents from school. You'll see. That's the way it was for Bill and me. It's one of the many gifts of parenting.

26. Life is the power that's greater than I can ever comprehend. The way life runs through everything, even the tiniest elements of nature - that makes me humble.


27. I still play hockey every now and then, and I still golf. But my biggest exercise is walking my big dog in the park every day.




28. I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.

29. As for my own truncated secondary education, my head was in the clouds as my mom would say, or if you asked my father, up my ass.




30. One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.

31. If I were overweight because I ate too much, I would have far more of a complex. I would know if I just stopped eating and showed a little discipline I would be thin. But there's not a hell of a lot I can do about being short. You just gotta run with it.

32. I don't have any affirmations, I don't have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities.





33. I was eccentric, even as a kid. I was an early reader, an early talker. I was very curious in a way that maybe the other kids weren't. I was a little more outgoing.

34. There's always failure. And there's always disappointment. And there's always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.

35. I'm also very proud to be a part of a trilogy of films that, if they do nothing else, allow people to check their problems at the door, sit down and have a good time.


36. Pity is a benign form of abuse.

37. I wouldn't have wanted to miss the opportunity to make those three films that didn't do well. They were really important to me, and the things I learned doing them were important to me.




38. I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.

39. I'm kind of private and I keep things inside a lot, but it's been so wonderful to realize that people care about you in a very deep way and that there is some bond between an actor and his audience. I don't even know how to describe that feeling.

40. The oldest form of theater is the dinner table. It's got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.


41. Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

42. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.

43. If I don't get food in my mouth, I'm still happy. If my pants are round my ankles, as long as I don't get arrested for indecent exposure, I'm happy. I'm worried about keeping my hair, not how it's combed.


44. After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.

45. No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.

46. You've probably read in People that I'm a nice guy - but when the doctor first told me I had Parkinson's, I wanted to kill him.



47. Now I feel and I say all the time that vanity is, like, long gone. I'm really free of worrying about what I look like, because it's out of my shaky hands. I don't control it. So why would I waste one second of my life worrying about it?

48. By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.

49. So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.




50. The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.

51. That's the way I look at things - if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you've lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I'm telling you - it works for me.

52. Everybody in the world knew I was before I knew who I was.



53. You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.

54. I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.

55. Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.


56. I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight.

57. Happiness is a decision.



58. Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.



59. A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.

60. I always felt that I came up short in the education department, but I've come to the conclusion that we all get an education.

61. When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.



62. What other people think about me is not my business.

63. Pay attention to what's happening around you. Read the book before you see the movie. Remember, though you, alone, are responsible for your own happiness, its still okay to feel responsible for someone else's. Live and to learn.

64. I don't want people to kick my ass, I just want to get to a point where they can't kick it.


65. If you don't take the time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?


66. In my 50s I'll be dancing at my children's weddings.

67. It may seem hard to believe, but it's catastrophe that offers the most promise for an even richer life. This is the gateway to the good stuff. In other words, you never truly know which way the wind is blowing until the shit hits the fan.

68. I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.



69. I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like.

70. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life. I practice a humility that presupposes there's a power greater than myself. And I always believe, don't inflict harm where it's not necessary.

71. Optimism is a cure for many things.






72. I have a remarkably normal life.

73. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to becomes master of your own destiny, you have more to learn.

74. I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.



75. After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.

76. I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.



77. I can't always control my body the way I want to, and I can't control when I feel good or when I don't. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.

78. If you're lucky, in some point in the future when you're in need of guidance or perhaps moral support, you may cross paths with a suitable mentor. Even luckier, you'll realize you had one in your life all along and you'll gain a new appreciation for how you benefited from that relationship. The luckiest relationship of all, of course, is a combination of the two. You've had help all along, and as the path widens or narrows, whatever the case may be, new and powerful influences will enter your life and aid your progress. In my experience, a mentor doesn't necessarily tell you what to do, but more importantly: tells you what they did or might do, then trusts you to draw your own conclusions and act accordingly. If you succeed, they'll take one step back and if you fail, they'll take one step closer. Whatever it is they teach you, pass it on.

79.  have so many things that I say to my kids, I just drive them crazy.







80. I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.

81. Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).

82. I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.


83. The laughs mean more to me than the adoration. If two girls walk up to me and one says "you're cute", I'll say thank you, but I appreciate it much more when the other one says "you make me laugh so much".

84. I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.

85. In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.

86. I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.

87. Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

88. I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.




89. So what I say about Tracy is this: Tracy's big challenge is not having a Parkinson's patient for a husband. It's having me for a husband. I happen to be a Parkinson's patient.

90. I'm not a shill for the Democratic Party.


91. I see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.

92. I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.

93. Pain is temporary, film is forever.

94. Just as Parkinson's isn't a big topic of conversation in my house, neither is my career.




95. I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.

96. Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.


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