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Michael Landon
Quotes
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Inspirational l
Love l
Happiness l Childhood
l Family l
Humorous l Work
l Success l
Issues l Life
l Legacy
Faith
I believe in God, family, truth between people, the power of love.
I believe that there is God in all of us.
I'm the strange
product of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. My mother was
anti-Semitic and my father wasn't really that thrilled with
Catholics. So my belief in God is a very, very personal one.
Dreams and Expectations
Dreaming is one thing, and working towards the dream
is one thing, but working with expectations in mind is very
self-defeating.
I
don't have expectations. Expectations in your life just lead to
giant disappointments.
Inspirational
Somebody should tell us right at the start of our
lives that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every
minute of every day. Do it! I say. Whatever you want to do, do it
now! There are only so many tomorrows.
I think all of us create our own miracles.
I’m convinced that everyone has
some kind of hidden talent. God sees to it – it’s that simple.
Love
I like writing about love and its various forms
because it’s the best of life....Love between a man and a woman or a
parent and a child or even between friends represents the very best
we have to offer as human beings. I think it should be exalted at
every opportunity.
Love
is what lets you live on. It’s the most powerful thing in the
universe. Don’t ever take it for granted.
There's no substitute for love.
It's what brings happiness.
Happiness
My
personal family life is my personal happiness. The happiness I get
from work – and there’s a lot - doesn’t even come close.
It's a lot harder to be happy. You can sit around and
be miserable –
it takes no effort at all.
Childhood
My family was not the kind a
kid would like to grow up in. But on the other hand, God
compensates. You receive gifts from pain. Good comes out of bad.
Moxie is one of my gifts. My open emotionalism is one of my gifts. I
probably wouldn’t have had those things if I had come from a very
comfortable, everything’s-OK family.
My childhood was really
strange. My parents just flat out didn't like each other and never
did during their married life. My father gradually went down the
tubes and my mother was always sticking her head in the oven
pretending she was going to commit suicide. In a case like this you
either end up spending the rest of your life in analysis or you get
a helluva lot of guts. In my case it worked out great.
I was grown before I realized
that other mothers didn't put their heads in the oven.
Family and Parenting
You don’t learn to be a good parent – you just love
your kids and do your best. And you don’t always do it right. Even
if you do, you can’t be sure how your kids will turn out....I
believe kids should be what they want to be. They should look the
way they want to look, as long as it’s not in violation of the law.
Everyone has got to have a shot at being a person.
If a kid wants to achieve anything in life, whether
he’s going to be an athlete or a doctor, he has to learn
self-discipline.
If there's one thing in the
world I want for my kids, it's incentive. I want to be especially
careful about my sons in this area. They will know all along that
they have to work for money, because I'm not just going to give it
to them. Sometimes they'll resent that, but I think they'll recover
because eventually they'll understand it has to do with love.
I don’t
believe in a buddy-buddy relationship between parents and children.
The parent is the parent and the child is the child. My kids may not
always agree with certain rules I lay down and I will discuss the
rules with them, but the ultimate choice of whether the rules are
carried out or not is mine. As long as those rules are constant, I
don’t think they’re resented at all.
Humorous
I get five checks every week no
matter what happens. There are no feathers in the peacock's tail
between me and Johnny.
Exhilaration is that feeling
you get just after a great idea hits you . . . and just before you
realize what's wrong with it.
(Quote from 1983 about how NBC could increase its
viewership) Different
call letters.
(Quote from 1969 about what work he'll do after
Bonanza) I
want to do something contemporary. I want to see if I can walk
without this gun. You see I kind of lean funny.
(Quote from 1977 about an advantage of directing
a show in which he's also starring)
The big advantage of
course is that I cooperate completely with myself. When the director
says move, I move, wherever he wants me to go, I go there.
(Quote from 1982 about doing another series)
I don’t know. But if
I do, it will definitely be in a contemporary situation. I’ve had 22
years of saying ‘Whoa!’ – and I have to tell you, I drive much
better than I ride.
(About having cancer)
I want my agent to know that this shoots to hell any
chance of my doing a health-food commercial.
I've been on this show for 14
years and no one ever told me about taking off for the Jewish
holidays.
(In response to a question about who was his most
loyal and devoted fan)
My agent keeps telling me he is!
People still say I'm arrogant, they just don't say
I'm insecure anymore.
I walked into NBC and said I
wanted to be an angel. Then I slowly floated down and (Tartikoff)
bought it.
(About casting the TV movie Where Pigeons Go
To Die)
I’ll be in it because the writer-director loves me.
I have the best crew in
Hollywood. If I asked them to walk across Lake Tahoe, on the bottom,
they'd fight to see who was first into the water.
Work
I want people to laugh and cry, not just sit and
stare at the TV. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think viewers are
hungry for shows in which people say something meaningful.
(Quote from 1974 about what kind of Little
House scripts he wanted)
The kind that brings tears to
your eyes.
Every script I've written and every series I've
produced have expressed the things I most deeply believe.
I’m not interested in acting in, writing, or even seeing a show if I
can’t admire or identify with anyone in it.
(About acting)
I realized that it was a great
release for me. I could cry while I was someone else. I could get a
lot of things out of my system that I couldn't get out on my own.
The only thing I’ve learned
over the years is not to act. It’s hard to catch me acting.
(Quote about his first directing his first show)
It had a great deal to do
with some types of lighting that had not been done before. And a lot
of people said don't do it. But it was my one shot, as far as I was
concerned. I wanted them to either like it or not like it the way
that I wanted it to be. It really turned out quite well, so I was
able to continue on. But I realized that you really can’t listen to
a whole bunch of people –
because a
whole bunch of people are no more right than one person who knows
what he wants.
My dad had been a publicity
man and knew all the ropes. He told me: Never take no from a man who
doesn't have the authority to say yes.
If Michael Landon bombs, I
don't want anyone else to have to take the blame but Michael Landon.
(Quote from 1984
about Highway to Heaven) The
show is not for everybody. But if we all looked to everything with
the same eyes, it would be a dull world.
There are an awful lot of
people out there who are trying to make people laugh; there are very
few shows that can, on a regular basis, give an audience a good cry.
I know I can do that – and if I do it well, they (the audience) will
be back.
I am a guy who is merely trying
to do a job as well as he can.
Success
I never thought being a star
would make my life different, and it hasn't. The house is a little
bigger, the rooms are a little bigger. But the feelings – they're
still the same.
A Bonanza is something that happens to an actor once
in a lifetime — if he's fantastically lucky — and I'd be a stupid
fool not to enjoy it.
I’m so
shocked that I ever got this successful….I was always happy wherever
I was as long as I could make a living for my family. For me, making
a living in this business was the ultimate because I love doing it.
I love the business itself. And the only difference was how big your
yard was….If you’re making x amount of bucks, you’ve got a bigger
yard, but that doesn’t mean that you’re gonna have more fun in that
yard than you had in any sandlot you ever played on – as long as
everybody was doing it together. There are a lot of big empty lots
around.
Issues
If drugs were legalized tomorrow, my kids wouldn't
take drugs. People who take drugs take drugs. So to spend billions a
year trying to find out where somebody's growing a marijuana plant I
think is ridiculous.
We have to raise the poverty level of people all over
the world....if you live in Ethiopia, it doesn't cost you anything
to have twelve kids as opposed to four kids. I mean, you're used to
dying anyway. What you're hoping is that when you're old maybe some
of these twelve will be alive so they can bring you a cup of water,
because you can't get it yourself. You're gonna be too sick. So they
just keep having kids. It's been the history of civilization that,
the more that you get rid of that poverty, people then begin
thinking about how many children they're going to have....And we
have to stop believing that it's some religious thing....I mean, God didn't say that contraception is bad. Man did.
(About government attempts at censorship)
We all have
responsibilities. It’s up to you to take care of your child. It’s
not up to the federal government to decide.
Pollution is a lot worse than people make it out to be. Because we
have no energy policy. If we did, we would be moving away from the
use of oil. You know why we don’t pursue solar energy? Because you
don’t make the money. It’s renewable, it’s free – they don’t want
that.
Life and Death
I’m not the kind of person who gives up without a
fight. If I’m gonna die, Death’s gonna have to do a lot of fighting
to get me. I’m not just gonna lie down and let it happen.
Life has been good to me. It's not like I missed an
awful lot. I had a pretty good lick here. Every moment gets a little
more important.
I'm going to beat this cancer or die trying.
Legacy
(Quote about whether he needed more than children
for his legacy)
I think that’s the only legacy people need: the
knowledge that when you’re ready to leave this place you’ve left
behind a bunch of young people who are actually going to be good for
this planet. They’re gonna do good things. The world’s gonna be
better because they’re around. That makes you feel good….[and] you
hope that way, way, way down the line, if you have the kind of
family where everybody talks, the oldest person can then continue to
hand down the knowledge of the family and the caring and so forth.
That’s good stuff.
I
think it‘s very presumptuous for anyone to think that they should be
remembered by anybody else except their family. I mean in this
little short space of time that we’re here, over the great thousands
of years that are gonna pass, who’s really gonna be remembered? And
for what reason?
The one thing I need to leave behind is good
memories.
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