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Each morning and night I get down on my knees and thank God for my life and ask Him to make me grateful all the time instead of just most of the time.
Orson Bean
Even I get fan mail.
You know when I was a kid, I hated every day I was in school, from the kindergarten right through to my last day of high school.
San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.
Left-wingers and right-wingers come together when they become extreme enough. The Nazi Party was called National Socialism, very similar to Stalin's Communism, with the addition of 'the Fatherland.'
I don't expect to be another Walt Disney, but I do get a terrific bang out of being able to say things with pictures. Maybe that means something deep and profound about me - but I doubt it.
Well, I haven't done that many movies, but the best one was 'Being John Malkovich.'
The nineteen fifties was a time of tumultuous change.
Anything that's done correctly is easy.
I always identified with Frankenstein because as a kid, I never got the girl.
Young actors ask me for advice. They say, 'Should I get an agent?' I tell them, 'Don't worry about that. Act, act, act. Get into that production of 'The Three Sisters' in a church basement. Consider every audition a chance to act, even if it's just for three minutes. Just do it whenever and wherever you can.'
I think it was a miracle that Trump got elected.
I never cared what anyone thought about me.
I think people are afraid to be original.
Children can become self-reliant and self-disciplined by being free to do what they want to do.
I knew people who were real Communists but never made it onto the blacklist and kept on working. There were also people reputed to be Communists who weren't.
I like to work. I like to go every night and play a part.
War was a way of life for Americans in the early forties. Heroism was expected.
I'm thankful I've learned to embrace insecurity, not just to tolerate it. Life is more fun that way, and I'm thankful for that, too.
In New Jersey, judges have ruled that a same-sex couple or a single person applying to adopt must be given the same place in line as a married man and woman. I think that's bad for kids. This makes me homophobic? I'm in show business. Half the people in my life are gay.
In '08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I'd supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he'd won. I really hadn't thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so.
My father was an odd stick. He was a member of MENSA and he was a uniformed yard cop for the Harvard police.
One night in a club in Boston, I tried the name Roger Duck. No laughs. The next night, I tried Orson Bean, putting together a pompous first name and a silly second name. I got laughs, so I decided to keep it.
Advertising has always been part show biz.
Part of me is nonhuman and eccentric, which is what a hobbit is, and I don't mind being eccentric.
It's funny, I never watch TV. I watch Fox News.
I don't believe most kids enjoy school at all, and that's a shameful waste, considering how curious and excited kids are to learn. They're naturally curious, full of wonder.
My grandfather lived in New England all his life and was a Vermonter.
Back in the fifties (the nineteen fifties, not the eighteen fifties) I did some writing for Mad Magazine, along with my friend Ernie Kovaks and a pair of comics named Bob and Ray.
Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.
It's never been written about, but before the blacklist of Dalton Trumbo and the Hollywood Ten, there was a de facto blacklist by Communists in the movie industry, and there were a lot of them.
Old people come up to me and say, 'Are you still alive? I used to watch you on 'To Tell The Truth' when I was a kid.'
Strange are the ways of human behavior.
When I grew up, which was really in the 30s and the 40s, the movies were a moral guideline for me.
I make more than a handsome living doing voices for commercials; I hear myself all day on the tube.
What is it with me? I seem to be an incorrigible black-listee.
I think America was a miracle. I think God loves this country.
Until I read Neill's book, 'Summerhill', I thought there were only two ways to bring up children, either with authoritarian discipline or with permissiveness. Either way, hopefully, applied with love. Now I know there is a third way: teaching a child self*regulation, not by coercion or by abandoning discipline, but by freedom with responsibility.
I used to picture myself as the old guy eating the Early Bird Specials in the mall.
In the long period of time when I did talk shows and game shows, a whole new generation of people came along who thought of me as that, and not as a theater person.
I adored my mother. She was beautiful, smart, sexy and funny.
I never thought that I couldn't do what I set out to do. It wasn't from arrogance; it was from ignorance.
I felt only a conservative president could bring peace in Vietnam 'cause he wouldn't be accused of being soft on communism.
I think of my life as a cheap novel. Part of you wants it to go on forever, and part of you wants to see how it comes out.
I did my teen-age years in World War II. War news was a constant. We kept the radio on in our house to hear Edward R. Murrow broadcasting from the rooftops of London, describing the blitz.
The reason I became a Christian is the same reason I became a conservative: I paid attention.
I didn't use a voice change to do Bilbo. I have a distinctive voice anyway. I did an attitude change, making Bilbo kind of fussy - fussy and proper - then gradually dropped the fussiness and properness as the madness of battle really affects him.
One of the things I'm proudest of, one year on my refrigerator, I taped a Christmas card from the Republican National Committee and season's greetings from Gus Hall of the American Communist Party. They both stayed up their months and I'm proud of it.
I've made a lot of dumb mistakes, but I don't regret them at all.
My wife and I sold our house New York and moved to Australia for a year; then we came back and spent almost three years bumming around the country in an old '61 VW van. We put the kids in school wherever we happened to be, but mainly we reveled in being rootless.
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