Dirk Benedict Quotations

Time is money, as they say, and it was never more apropos than on a television show, where a minute is worth about $200!

Life has never been easy. Nor is it meant to be. It is a matter of being joyous in the face of sorrow.

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.

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.

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.

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.

America is terrified of the passage of time. Prozac Nation. Land of Face Lifts.

I have written two nonfiction books, I'm embarrassed to say.

Children who cling to parents or who don't want to leave home are stunted in their emotional, psychological growth.

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.

There is a divine moment in our lives when we all become one. It's called procreation, and it is reborn, continually and forever.

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.

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 Gods children.

I am very willing to share whatever I know or feel I know about finding some serenity in this lifetime.

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.

If you want to have great success, you'd better give them what they want, but so be it.

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.

I can still fit into my Battlestar Galactica costume!

The best things in life are usually difficult.

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.

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.

From Fred Astaire I learned discipline and hard work.

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.

I wanted to be Anthony Hopkins and ended up being neither a film star nor having a career on the stage.

If we wait until our lives are free from sorrow or difficulty, then we wait forever. And miss the entire point.

With my introduction to Miss Swanson and macrobiotics, I had become obsessed.

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.

Movies are movies, television is television.

You can't leave civilization behind entirely.

The space genre is timeless.

Change is good. And in fact unavoidable.

Hollywood today is all about being consistent. All thinking in mainstream film business takes place in one box.

From dear, dear Gloria Swanson, I learned how to live long, happy and free of health problems. I owe her my life.

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.

Questions about acting are difficult.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

There is a divine moment in our lives when we become One. It is called pro-creation and it is reborn continually and forever in the future we call children. They are our destiny and we are theirs. The extent to which we fail as parents... we fail as God's Children.

Generally speaking, actors are allowed NO input. Actors are dumb.

Life without kids is like a camera without film.

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.

In their arrogance, ABC wanted a number-one show. They wouldnt accept losing that time slot.

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.

I never get involved with the ladies I work with.

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.

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.

When I was a young actor... the more different you were from the part you played, the more talent it reflected.

I'm the worst person to ask about how to get noticed. It took me 25 years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am very abnormal... But it wasnt very long ago that I wasnt so abnormal. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy.

LIFE: My favorite occupation.

Hurray, Hallelujah, and Happy Prostate! Finally, someone has taken the years and done the work, so the rest of us no longer need suffer from ignorance as to how to have good prostate health. That someone is Roger Mason, and all that one needs to know in order to have a happy prostate has been distilled down into this one book. I would stake the health of my prostate on it, and can tell you as a prostate cancer survivor; it is the ONLY way to go.

Men hand out cigars. Women `hand out' babies. And thus the world, for thousands of years, has gone round.

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.

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.

My favorite thing is to be alone in a room with a blank paper in front of me and the time to fill it.

A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cassavetes would have been pleased with me. Truffaut, too, I think.

I maintain you can make a film/TV star out of a can of sardines.

I live very much, try to, in the moment, and find whichever moment I'm in to be the best.

I have my routine. I'm running 3 or 4 miles a day.

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.

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.

I enjoy writing nonfiction the most because one is limited only by one's imagination. Autobiography is tough.

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.

Today I spend more time making music than I do writing.

I also knew that, although infinitely slower, the only real path to personal health and happiness was through my own slow and painful understanding.

I ALWAYS enjoy myself. And if I didn't enjoy myself in this experience, I should be locked away for lack of gratitude.

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.

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.

It is marketing that makes films popular. Cross-marketing. Selling movies with hamburgers and Coke.

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.

Over the years I've had many agents, too many to remember.

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.

That's the network mentality. They're always chasing the polls, trying to second-guess what the people like.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Films are about emotions. They are, for the most part and certainly in today's mainstream film world, NOT about ideas. Not thought-provoking. They are all about EMOTION. FEELINGS.

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.

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.

Festivals today are driven by female perspective. My film is about heterosexual men over 40. And it was very much alone.

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.

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.

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.

That's Hollywood. Boom! From star to forgotten actor.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.