Michael J Fox Quotes

One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered.

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

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

Family is not an important thing, it's everything.

A creative mess is better than idle tidiness.

What other people think of me is not my business.

Happiness is a decision.

When life takes away, something of greater value is always given in return.

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.

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

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

I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.

Don’t spend a lot of time imagining the worst-case scenario. It rarely goes down as you imagine it will, and if by some fluke it does, you will have lived it twice.

Optimism is a cure for many things.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Carry on. If you’re going to do something, just do it.

With gratitude, optimism becomes sustainable.

The only thing that separates any one of us from excellence is fear and the opposite of fear is faith. I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for, perfection is God’s business.

Chris[topher] 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.

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.

As with any turning point or instance when a new road is chosen and an old one forsaken, there are consequences.

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).

The purpose that you wish to find in life, like a cure you seek, is not going to fall from the sky. ...I believe purpose is something for which one is responsible; it's not just divinely assigned.

My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.

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.

Live and try.

Listening to people espouse beliefs different from mine is informative, not threatening, because the only thing that can alter my worldview is a new and undeniable truth, and contrary to what Jack Nicholson says in 'A Few Good Men', "I CAN handle the truth.

Hanging out with Sam or any two-year-old is basically one big suicide watch. Their mission is to find one new way after another of offing themselves - piss in an electric socket, lick a pit bull's nose, chase an ice cream truck into traffic - and your job as a parent is to step in before it happens.

I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.

Family is not an important thing, it is everything

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

Ironic that in order to do my life's work, I had to quit my day job.

He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.

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

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

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.

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

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.

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.

It is one of the great ironies of my life that only when it became virtually impossible for me to keep my body from moving would I find the peace, security, and spiritual strength to stand in one place. I couldn't be still until I could—literally—no longer keep still.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

A lighthouse...speaks to the guiding nature of hope. By equal turns, it illuminates and darkens, so the way forward can be chosen in the light, and trusted in the darkness.

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.

Personally, I didn't take a single photograph while I was there, but that's not all that unusual for me. I suppose my aversion to snapping pictures may have something to do with shaky hands and blurry results, but there's another reason: The act of lifting up the camera and positioning it between me and the object of my interest separates me from the experience.

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.

Don't worry about him," Nana would assure them. "Michael will do more in his life than you can ever imagine.

When I visit the past now, it is for wisdom and experience, not for regret or shame.

And the second [thing about the CBS EVENING NEWS that stands out in the mind of Michael J. Fox] was something Katie did later in the interview, as the drugs kicked in and the tremors segued into the jerkiness of dyskinesias. Somewhere in the contortions of making a point, my left arm detached the microphone clip from my jacket lapel. With no fuss and hardly a break in conversation or eye contact, she calmly leaned over and refastened it. Neither of us commented on it, but it was such an empathetic gesture, so far from anything patronizing or pitying, a simple kindness that allowed me the dignity to carry on making a point more important than the superficiality of my physical circumstance... ...One thing was abundantly clear though, whether or not she was able to forget how much she liked me: with that single act of consideration, she made it abundantly clear how much she loved her father.

So much of what’s important in life seems to sneak up on me. So much time and energy invested in getting ready to go someplace, and then getting there, that the sensation of being there is a revelation.

Frankly, my height or lack thereof never bothered me much. Although there is no doubt that it has contributed to a certain mental toughness. I've made the most of the head start one gains from being underestimated.

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.

When describing me, Tracy often refers to a well-known concept of physics: 'inertia.' As Newton avers in his first law: 'An object that is not moving will not move until a force acts upon it. An object that is moving will not change its velocity until a net force acts upon it.' In other words, depending on what's happening in my life at any given moment, I can either be the laziest human being on the planet, or the busiest. I'm perfectly content to do absolutely nothing until I'm catalyzed by some person or project, and then I go nonstop until some countervailing force acts upon me, and I revert back to static mode.

Still, what's happened before and what may happen later can't be as important as what's happening now.

Every failure I have considered my own, but every success has been shared.

The only unavailable choice was whether or not to have Parkinson's. Everything else was up to me.

Our challenges don't define us, our actions do,

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

This message is so simple, yet it gets forgotten. The people living with the condition are the experts.

I wouldn't have minded living in Provence for a month or however long it took for me to learn to say, 'I've been attacked by a wild boar. Help me find my spleen!

I've dropped my pebble in the ocean, and hopefully; throughout the course of the day; millions of others will drop theirs in too. No single one of us knows which pebble causes the wave to crest, but each of us, quite rightly, believes that it might be ours; an act of faith.

It seems to me that the quality of a moment in time is not always a reflection of the moment in and of itself—what happens before and what happens after are often what give it its savor.

They have hopes and dreams that may echo or overlap your own. And there's no reason why you can't make room for them. But what's happening to you right now, precisely at this instant, belongs only to you. Own it... This is your moment. Let someone else take the picture... just smile.

Being in control of your own destiny is a myth—and wouldn’t be half as much fun anyway. 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, it’s still okay to feel responsible for someone else’s.

Going public was a difficult decision, and I had misgivings. My subjective experience was now an objective fact in the wider world. It didn't belong to just me anymore - though I quickly learned that it hadn't belonged to just me in the first place. More than a million Americans and their families were going through the same thing; some openly, some in secret due to concerns of being misunderstood and marginalized.

When I visit the past now, it is for wisdom and experience, not for regret or shame. I don’t attempt to erase it, only to accept it. Whatever my physical circumstances are today, I will deal with them and remain present. If I fall, I will rise up. As for the future, I haven’t been there yet. I only know that I have one. Until I don’t. The last thing we run out of is the future. Really, it comes down to gratitude. I am grateful for all of it—every bad break, every wrong turn, and the unexpected losses—because they’re real. It puts into sharp relief the joy, the accomplishments, the overwhelming love of my family. I can be both a realist and an optimist. Lemonade, anyone?

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06. By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken. Just as I'd hoped.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. —Michael J. Fox

Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turned out.

If you don’t take risks, there’s no room for luck. I took a chance. I got lucky.

I was happy as a clam. But who wants to be a clam?

I’m sure there are many other Forrest Gump moments that I’m forgetting. I don’t mention them as boasts, but rather as evidence of how ridiculously lucky I have been to have lived the life that I have.

We can all take something positive from the class of 2020; to accept what has happened in the past, to embrace the present, and to remain open to the probability that it will get better in the future.

to the Future: If Michael J. Fox doesn’t get his parents together by the prom, he might not ever be BORN!!!!!!!!! Proving the importance of the prom from both a societal as well as a BIOLOGICAL point of view!

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a big one, Michael J. Fox has a small one, Madonna doesn't have one, The Pope has one but doesn't use it, Dominique Strauss-Khan uses his all the time. What is it? A last name! And shame on you for thinking it was something else.

We can all take something positive from the class of 2020; to accept what has happened in the past, to embrace the present, and to remain open to the probability that it will get better in the future. I hear echoes of Stephen Pollan in that advice: With gratitude, optimism becomes sustainable.

When describing me, Tracy often refers to a well-known concept of physics: “inertia.” As Newton avers in his first law: An object that is not moving will not move until a force acts upon it. An object that is moving will not change its velocity until a net force acts upon it. In other words, depending on what’s happening in my life at any given moment, I can either be the laziest human being on the planet, or the busiest. I’m perfectly content to do absolutely nothing until I’m catalyzed by some person or project, and then I go nonstop until some countervailing force acts upon me, and I revert back to static mode.

It never occurred to me that any of these pleasures were a reward for being a pretty good kid, any more than I needed to restructure my life just to avoid an eternity of being spit-roasted on a subterranean barbecue. If this sounds flip, smug, or disrespectful, it's not meant to be. Obviously, there is great wisdom, beauty, and relevance in millennia worth of collected theological teaching from around the world. The question I'm grappling with is: why didn't these big themes and major stick-and-carrot extremes resonate with me? I just never bought into the concept. Maybe I'm part of a small minority, but I don't think so.

Recovering alcoholics have an expression: “If you have one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you’re pissing all over today.” With all that’s happened, it’s been liberating to understand that I don’t have to carry the weight of all my disappointments or expectations. Sometimes it just is what it is. I can accept that.

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 screw up, they’ll take one step closer. Whatever it is they teach you…pass it on.

This is why the license plates say Beautiful British Columbia, and I realized just how much I would miss it. But all this natural beauty exists only in response to rain, I reminded myself, and the occasional day of technicolor spectacle was bought and paid for with weeks and weeks of dull, damp gray. I wasn't going to miss the gray. If

Explaining how the two of them, up there in the Green Mountains, had managed to dial down life's urgencies and dial up its pleasures and richness, Gary put it beautifully and poetically: "We've discovered a way" he confided with a sense of gleeful wonderment, "to bend time." I imagined Tracy and me engaged in a similar conspiracy a dozen years or so from now.

I have referred to it as a gift--something for which others with this affliction have taken me to task. I was only speaking from my own experience, of course, but I stand partially corrected: if it is a gift, it's the gift that just keeps on taking. Coping with relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy. Nobody would ever choose to have this visited upon them. Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality--or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was--courage? acceptance? wisdom?--that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift--and absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched. That's why I consider myself a lucky man.

The opposite of fear is faith' is an adage I heard often when I quit drinking. The thinking is that fear is paralyzing or even regressive, causing you to retreat in defense, while faith inspires forward progress. So why, I always wondered, does fear feature so prominently in our discussions and practice of faith? We talk about fear of God as a good thing - and being God-fearing as a desirable state. I know I'm not the first to say this, and smarter people have given it more thorough examination and more eloquent expression, but that just makes no sense to me. It's counterintuitive and, I think, confuses fear with respect. As a way of motivating people, cultivating fear is easier than investing the time and effort necessary to engender respect. Respect requires greater knowledge, and in my experience, the more you know, the less you fear. In the year or so between my Parkinson's diagnosis and my quitting drinking, I had considered getting sober but feared life without the perceived buffer of alcohol. What I came to realize after a few months of disciplined sobriety was that my fear had nothing to do with alcohol or a lack thereof. It had to do with a lack of self-understanding. As I gained more intimate knowledge of myself, why I did the things I did, what my resentments were, and how I could address them, my fear began to subside.

I seem to recall a story of how when Michael J. Fox visited Tibet that he suffered no symptoms of his Parkinson's, so great was the spiritual energy that surrounded him. If this is true, I wish I could be a human Tibet.

I liked Alan immediately. He was funny, smart and witty—three traits that make it easy to comically play off someone else. Playing opposite someone as gifted as Alan made it easier for me to become Mike Seaver. Alan was always extremely generous with his compliments about fellow cast members. Once in an interview he said, “Successful family shows need someone with that magic—the look that has the chance to take the country by storm. Michael J. Fox did that. Kirk seemed to have that. I thought, This is a good rocket to hitch my star to.

Family it is not an important thing, it is everything.

The debate of August 6, 2015 was held in Cleveland, Ohio, and broadcast on Fox News and Facebook. It was the first debate and the most anticipated question that loomed was how Trump would perform. He’d never participated in a formal debate before, making him a neophyte up against practiced and supposedly ruthless opposition. The world had no idea what was coming, and neither did the deer-in-the-headlights Republicans who were helpless to counter the sheer aggressive force of Donald Trump.

As much I’d like to,

I began to long for the benign indifference of Robert Redford flossing his molars.

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. Michael J. Fox

Among other things, don't start with the beer.

This is what my lifelong search for room to maneuver had come to: a box of water in a lightless, windowless nine-by-sixteen-foot room—afraid to leave my artificial womb, to go outside where I could only cause trouble, disappoint my family and myself. Best, I thought, to stay right here where I couldn't fuck anything up. And stay I would, day after day, sometimes three or four times on weekends, for hours at a time, just trying to keep my head below water. Connecticut—Christmas

was an antidote to the self-consciousness that consumed me as an eccentric teenager in search of an identity.

In watching any of the hoverboard sequences, especially the extended ones like the chase in the Hill Valley square and the tunnel where Biff is trying to reclaim the sports almanac, one can see that a mixture of techniques were used. In some cases, the effects that appear amazing on-screen were really quite low-tech. Thin metal wire legs were placed right in the middle of the underside of some Styrofoam props, so that when Michael J. Fox threw them down, they would wobble as if levitating. In shots where one end of the board was out of frame, the other side was sometimes held by a crew member until Fox grabbed it and tucked it under his arm. When the actors’ feet were obscured, they were often shot from the waist up and put on actual skateboards. Sometimes they were pulled on a large dolly. Large sheets of plywood would be added to the ground in order to create additional height in comparison with the rest of what was in the frame.