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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.

-Michael J. Fox

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There's Always Failure. And

Michael J. Fox

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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.

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By The Time I Entered High School, I Had Forsaken Academics Altogether In Favor Of My Burgeoning Acting Career.

I Urge You To Be Challenged And Inspired By What You Do Not Know.

Disease Is A Non-partisan Problems That Requires A Non-partisan Solution.

If You Allow For The Possibilities Of Something Better, You Move Toward It Instinctively.

Something Better

My View Of Life Is Colored By Humor And Looking At The Best In Any Situation.

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.

I Think The Scariest Person In The World Is The Person With No Sense Of Humor.

I Don't Think [parkinson's] Is Gothic Nastiness. There's Nothing On The Surface That's Horrible About Someone With A Shaky Hand. There's Nothing Horrible About Someone In Their Life Saying, "god, I'm Really Tired Of This Shaky Hand Thing" And Me Saying, "me, Too." That's Our Reality. We Have No Control Over It.

I've Never Gotten Up To See Something One Of My Kids Wanted To Show Me And Not Been Rewarded.

With Parkinson's, It's Like You're In The Middle Of The Street And You're Stuck There In Cement Shoes And You Know A Bus Is Coming At You, But You Don't Know When. You Think You Can Hear It Rumbling, But You Have A Lot Of Time To Think. And So You Just Don't Live That Moment Of The Bus Hitting You Until It Happens. There's All Kinds Of Room In That Space.

Since I'm Not Sure Of The Address To Which To Send My Gratitude, I Put It Out There In Everything I Do.

Whatever The Situation, Just Take It For What It Is. You Don't Have To Make It Worse Or Better Than It Is. It Just Is What It Is. Always Deal With The Honesty, The Truth Of What Something Is, And Then You've Got All Kinds Of Choices.

I Am Careful Not To Confuse Excellence With Perfection. Excellence I Can Reach For; Perfection Is God's Business.

Inspirational Life

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.

It Is Ironic That In The Same Year We Celebrate The 50th Anniversary Of The Discovery Of Dna, Some Would Have Us Ban Certain Forms Of Dna Medical Research. Restricting Medical Research Has Very Real Human Consequences, Measured In Loss Of Life And Tremendous Suffering For Patients And Their Families.

The Biggest Gift On Father's Day Is If I Can Be With All My Kids.

I Don't Look At Myself As A Leader. I Do Look At Myself As Part Of A Community.

I Remember My Son Wanted To Go To Bed With His Cowboy Boots On, And We Had This Fight For Like An Hour. Then I Realized That The Only Good Reason I Had For Him Not To Do It Is Because I Didn't Want Him To. There Was Really No Other Reason. And Finally I Said, "ok, Fine." It Was A Great Victory For Me, Because I Realized It Doesn't Really Matter.

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.

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.

In Fact, Parkinson's Has Made Me A Better Person. A Better Husband, Father And Overall Human Being.

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.

Do The Right Thing, And Then Do The Next Right Thing, And That Will Lead You To The Next Right Thing After That.

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 Teh Best That I Could Do With Whatever Lay In Front Of Me.

By 21, I Was Earning Six Figures A Week. By 23, I Had A Ferrari. It Was Nuts.

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.

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.

If You Have One Foot In Yesterday And One Foot In Tomorrow, You're Pissing All Over Today.

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.

In Terms Of What Happened Over That Hiatus That I Took, I Just Rested. I Spent That Time With My Family, During Their Really Formative Years, And Enjoyed That, And I Messed With Pills And New Medications That Help Me To Deal With Dyskinesia And Some Other Things I Was Struggling With, That I Don't Have As Much Now Because Of Medication To Counter The Side Effects. So, It Just Seemed Like The Right Time To Do It.

I Can Get Sad, I Can Get Frustrated, I Can Get Scared, But I Never Get Depressed - Because There's Joy In My Life.

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.

Only A Few Of Us Will Admit It, But Actors Will Sometimes Read A Script Like This: Bullshit...bullshit...my Part...blah, Blah, Blah...my Part...bullshit.

No Matter How Much Fame You Have, It's Not Something That Belongs To You. If I'm Famous, That Doesn't Belong To Me-that Belongs To You. If You Can't Remember Who I Am, I'm No Longer Famous.

I Got Sick Of Turning On The Tv And Seeing My Face.

He Gave Life To The Breath- Oxygen, A Simple Gas, He Transferred Into Words, Ideas, Hope.

[my Son] Will Have A Fairly Stable Future. Not One Where The Schoolyard Talk Is Whose Father Grossed $8 Million On His Last Picture.

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.

If You Want To Be An Agent Of Change, It Starts With You And What You're Made Of.

My Whole Life, Meeting People Is Like A Blind Date, Because I Feel Like They've Already Seen The Video On Me.

'why Do You Think It Is...', I Asked Dr. Cook ... 'that Brain Surgery, Above All Else-even Rocket Science-gets Singled Out As The Most Challenging Of Human Feats, The One Demanding The Utmost Of Human Intelligence?' [dr. Cook Answered,] 'no Margin For Error.'

Everybody In The World Knew I Was Before I Knew Who I Was.

The 'rescue Me' Gig Was A Unique Opportunity To Play A Character - A Misanthropic, Angry Guy - Who Was So Contrary To How People Think Of Me.

Humility Is Always A Good Thing. It's Always A Good Thing To Be Humbled By Circumstances So You Can Then Come From A Sincere Place To Try To Deal With Them.

The More I Expect, The More Unhappy I Am Going To Be. The More I Accept, The More Serene I Am.

If Spirituality Is That You're Humble In The Face Of Forces Greater Than You And You Believe Those Forces Are More Inclined Toward Being Good Than Being Bad, Then I'm A Spiritual Person.

Optimism Is A Cure For Many Things.

Life Is What You Put Into It And How Much You Take Out Of It. You Put In More Than Is Expected, And You Take Out Less Than You Want.

Everything Is Cause And Effect. If You Don't Move, Nothing Will Move With You, And Nothing Will Move Toward You.

Cause And Effect

Just As Parkinson's Isn't A Big Topic Of Conversation In My House, Neither Is My Career.

I Wait For Good Opportunities To Come Up To Do Stuff; I'm Not Seeking Things. I'm Quite Busy In The Meantime, But If The Right Thing Came Up, I Would Be Happy To Do It.

The Moment I Understood This - That My Parkinson's Was The One Thing I Wasn't Going To Change - I Started Looking At The Things I Could Change, Like The Way Research Is Funded.

I'm Glad I Don't Have A Drinking Problem,' I Confided, 'because I Don't Think I'd Ever Be Able To Quit.

Life Delivered Me A Catastrophe, But I Found A Richness Of Soul.

Richness Of Life

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.

I Didn't Just Want To Be A Poster Boy And Sign On To Publicize Somebody Else's Method Of Operations. If I Was Going To Put Myself Out There, I Wanted To Make Sure That It Was To An End. So I Got Involved With This Congressional Hearing About Parkinson's Being Underfunded.

The Secret To A Good Marriage, As Far As I Am Concerned, Is A Joke I Make: Keep The Fights Clean And The Sex Dirty.

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.

I Don't Feel A Yearning Or A Sense Of Missed Opportunities. I Don't Have Many Regrets. So That's A Nice Feeling. To Have No Regrets And Still Have Enough Sense Of Adventure To Take On Risk.

Certainly People Have A Lot Tougher Situations Than I've Had To Deal With. But I Will Say We Are All Dying From The Moment We Are Born. This Is Not Just Rehearsal.

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.

I Don't Burden Myself Too Much With Others' Expectations - Or Even My Own Expectations. I Think Your Happiness Grows In Direct Proportion To Your Acceptance, And In Inverse Proportion To Your Expectations. It's Just A Matter Of Putting One Foot In Front Of The Other - Or Doing The Next Right Thing, So To Speak.

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.

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.

Pain Is Temporary, Film Is Forever.

I Think I Benefited From Being Equal Parts Ambitious And Curious. And Of The Two, Curiosity Has Served Me Best.

I Take The Medication For Myself So I Can Transact, Not For Anyone Else. But I Am Aware That It Is Empowering For People To See What I Do And, For The Most Part, People In The Parkinson's Community Are Just Really Happy That Parkinson's Is Getting Mentioned, And Not In A Pitying Way.

My Age Makes Me Think How Valuable Life Is. How Bad Is Something Like Parkinson's In Relation To Not Having Life At All?

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.

I Have So Many Things That I Say To My Kids, I Just Drive Them Crazy.

Look At The Choices You Have, Not The Choices That Have Been Taken Away From You. In Them, There Are Whole Worlds Of Strength And New Ways To Look At Things.

My Tattoo Is That I Don't Have A Tattoo.

My Wife Is Jewish, And Therefore, It's My Children's Birthright To Be Jewish.

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.

The Least Amount Of Judging We Can Do, The Better Off We Are.

I Didn't Want O 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.

I Truly Believe That We Have Infinite Levels Of Power That We Don't Even Know Are Available To Us.

I Worked Very Hard On Those Movies But There Was Some Creative Connection That Wasn't Being Made.

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.

Almost Instantly [after My Announcement Of Parkinson's], I Saw The First Couple Of Days The Coverage Was About, You Know, "fox's Parkinson's, Blah, Blah, Blah." Then, Two Days After That, I Saw The Coverage Turn. It Started To Become, "can Young People Get Parkinson's?" All Of A Sudden, The Conversation Turned To Become About That. And That Was One Of The First Eye-opening Things.

As Much As Parkinson's Is About Movement, The End Stage Is Being Frozen. So The More I Let That Happen, The More I'm Gonna Be Stuck Within That And Unable To Reverse It.

Pity Is A Benign Form Of Abuse.

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.

They Did Something Once That Slurred My Speech, And I Thought, "oh, Man, You're Messing With My Brain. It's Freaking Me Out."

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.

It’s All About Control. Control Is Illusory. No Matter What University You Go To, No Matter What Degree You Hold, If Your Goal Is To Become Master Of Your Own Destiny, You Have More To Learn. Parkinson’s Is A Perfect Metaphor For Lack Of Control. Every Unwanted Movement In My Hand Or Arm, Every Twitch That I Cannot Anticipate Or Arrest, Is A Reminder That Even In The Domain Of My Own Being, I Am Not Calling The Shots. I Tried To Exert Control By Drinking Myself To A Place Of Indifference, Which Just Exacerbated The Sense Of Miserable Hopelessness.

I Don't Keep Up With It All. But Taylor Swift Writes Songs About Everybody She Goes Out With, Right? What A Way To Build A Career.

There's Something I Have About Being Canadian - There's A Distance It Gives You When You Live In The States And Operate In American Culture. You Approach Familiar Things A Different Way; You Come At It From A Different Angle. It's A Trait That Runs Through A Lot Canadian Artists' Work And Actors' Work And Musicians' - That Kind Of Special Remove.

When Life Takes Away, Something Of Greater Value Is Always Given In Return.

The Only Thing Worse Than An Opportunity You Don't Deserve Is Blowing An Opportunity.

Happiness Is A Decision.

I See Possibilities In Everything. For Everything That's Taken Away, Something Of Greater Value Has Been Given.

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'.

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.

Ironic That In Order To Do My Life's Work, I Had To Quit My Day Job.

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.

Worst Case Scenario

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.

Acceptance Is The Key To Everything.

There Are Things I've Always Wanted To Do. Things I May Not Be Able To Do, But I Never Really Ruled Them Out - Like Running A Marathon. It's All A Matter Of Timing For Me. I Suppose I Could Probably Do It If I Planned It Out Right With Medication. I Don't Set A Whole Lot Of Goals. It Smacks A Little Bit Of Will To Me, And I Find That Will Is Not The Way To Go For Me.

I Don't Want People To Kick My Ass, I Just Want To Get To A Point Where They Can't Kick It.

As With Any Turning Point Or Instance When A New Road Is Chosen And An Old One Forsaken, There Are Consequences.

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.

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.

I Can Say, "i Don't Have Anything I Regret!" But I Can Also Say, "i Can Go Forward In My Life The Way It Is And I Don't Think I'll Accrue Any Future Regrets."

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.

There's A Connection That's Hard To Explain. It's The Feeling I Get When I See Someone Shuffle Up To Meet Me, Or Say Something, And I Can Instantly Tell By The Cant Of Their Head Or By The Movement Of Their Arms -- And These Are People Who Aren't Even Full-blown Symptomatic -- That They're One Of Us. And The Look They Give Me, It's Not Just Gratitude -- I Don't Care About The Gratitude -- But Solidarity. And Shared Optimism. And A Resiliency That Just Makes Me Think We're Doing The Right Thing, And That This Truly Is A Community.

My Happiness Grows In Direct Proportion To My Acceptance, And In Inverse Proportion To My Expectations.

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.

Family Is Not An Important Thing. It's Everything.

Vocabulary Words

When I Started It [non For Profit], I Thought, I'm Not Smart Enough To Do This. I Had No Experience In Management, No Experience In Administration, No Experience In Nonprofit; But Then This Phrase Came Into My Head: I Only Have To Be Smart Enough To Find People Who Are Smarter Than Me; I Only Have To Be Smart Enough To Recognize Who Knows More Than Me.

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.

Turning Fully Toward The Glass, I Consider What I See. This Reflected Version Of Myself, Wet, Shaking, Rumpled, Pinched, And Slightly Stoop, Would Be Alarming Were It Not For The Self-satisfied Expression Pasted Across My Face. I Would Ask The Obvious Question, 'what Are You Smiling About?' But I Already Know The Answer: 'it Just Gets Better From Here.'

I Might Have Skipped Class, But I Didn't Miss Any Lessons.

I Love The Irony. I'm Perceived As Being Really Young And Yet I Have The Clinical Condition Of An Old Man.

Our Challenges Don’t Define Us, Our Actions Do.

I'm Not A Shill For The Democratic Party.

You Know You're Old When You Get A Lifetime Achievement Award. It's A Message You've Been Around Too Long.

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.

There Are No Moments You Have Frozen In Amber. It's Moving, It's Changing, So Appreciate What's Good About Right Now And Be Ready For What's Next.

I've Learned Some Exciting Things - Mostly, That People Really Want To Help Each Other; And That, If You Can Lay Out A Vision For Them - And That Vision Is Sincere And Genuine - They'll Get Interested.

I Find As Long As I Acknowledge The Truth Of Something, Then That's It. I Know What It Is And Then I Can Operate. But If I Overestimate The Downside Of Something Or The Challenge Of Something And I Get Too Obsessed About The Difficulty Of It, Then I Don't Leave Enough Room To Be Open To The Upside, The Possibility.

I Definitely Believe In A Higher Power.

Vanity's Really Overrated. When I Was 20, Teenage Girls Had My Picture On The Wall... I Don't Need To Be Pretty Anymore. I Just Am Who I Am.

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.

Life Is The Power That's Greater Than I Can Ever Comprehend.

[constant Curiousity Leads To Happiness:] I Wake Up Curious Every Day And Every Day I'm Surprised By Something. And If I Can Just Recognize That Surprise Every Day And Say, 'oh, That's A New Thing, That's A New Gift That I Got Today That I Didn't Even Know About Yesterday,' It Keeps Me Going. It Keeps Me More Than Going. It Keeps Me Enthusiastic And Grateful!

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.

When I Was Younger, I Was Always Described As Happy-go-lucky. Then I Drank And I Partied - Did All That Stuff That Might Tell You Maybe There Was A Little Bit Of Untruth In That [description]. Now, The Surprising Thing Is That When I Say Stuff, I Actually Mean It. I Don't Have To Do The Work Of Trying To Formulate My Point Of View. It Just Is. And It's Surprising How Much I Love Life. I Just Really Have A Good Time.

I Think We All Get Our Own Bag Of Hammers. We All Get Our Own Parkinson's. We All Have Our Own Thing. I Think That We'll Look At It Through The Filter Of That Experience, And We'll Say, "yeah, I Need To Laugh At My Stuff, Too."

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.

When Something Enters Your Life That Is So Big And So Non-negotiable As Catastrophic Illness, You Either Go In Denial For A While Or Ultimately You Accept It And You Make Space For It. And In Making Space For It, You Illuminate A Lot Of Things That You Normally Don't Have Room For You Simply Just Look At The World Differently.

My Natural State Is One That's Affected By The Shortage Of Dopamine Production In My Brain. So My Natural State Is To Be Halting And At Times Tremulous And Kind Of Just Physically Disturbed. I Mean, That's My Natural State, Given The Situation In My Brain. But I'm Always As Happy Either Way. And So When It Comes To Me, Body Language Lies.

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.

I Think There's A God And I Know It's Not Me. I Don't Have A Set Of Tenets, But I Live An Ethical Life.

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.

When I Was Younger, I Was Always Described As Happy-go-lucky.

I Have Times When I'm Off-balance. I Have Times When I Slur My Words. I Have Times When I Walk Into Walls. I Have Times When I Can't Remember Somebody's Name.

When I Was 20, I Would Have Taken A Bullet In The Head To Never Have To Be 35.

I Saw A Birthday Card The Other Day, And It Said, "if You Didn't Know How Old You Were, How Old Would You Think You Were?" I Started Changing It In My Mind Right Away To, "if You Didn't Know How Sick You Were, How Sick Would You Think You Were?"

One's Dignity May Be Assaulted, Vandalized And Cruelly Mocked, But Cannot Be Taken Away Unless It Is Surrendered.

I Have Now Is Whenever My Kids Say, "can You Look At This?" Or "can I Ask You Something?" Or "can You Come Here For A Minute?" No Matter What I Am Doing, I Say Yes Instead Of Saying, "just A Sec." They Never Abuse The Privilege, And I Never Once Regretted It. What They Took Me Away To Do Was Never Less Important Than What I Was Doing Already.

If You Fixate On The Worst-case Scenario And It Actually Happens, You’ve Lived It Twice.

Worst Case Scenario

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.

Curiosity May Have Killed The Cat, But It Saved My Ass.

There's A Rule In Acting Called, 'don't Play The Result.' If You Have A Character Who's Going To End Up In A Certain Place, Don't Play That Until You Get There. Play Each Scene And Each Beat As It Comes. And That's What You Do In Life: You Don't Play The Result.

I Think There's A God And I Know It's Not Me.

Lance Armstrong Showed Up, And I Started Talking To Him; I Saw All These People With Cancer Who Followed Him To Paris For The Tour De France, And I Saw The Difference He Was Making In Their Lives. That Put It Together For Me...having It Be Not So Much About Me, But [my Being] A Vehicle For It.

The Way I Look At Life, And The Way I Look At The Reality Of Parkinson's, Is That Sometimes It's Frustrating And Sometimes It's Funny. I Need To Look At It That Way, And I Think Other People Will Look At It That Way.

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).

I Have A Remarkably Normal Life.

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.

I Don't Look At Life As A Battle Or As A Fight. I Don't Think I'm Scrappy. I'm Accepting.

After A Year Or So I Really Thought I Was Howard Hughes. Here I Was At Eighteen Years Old, Getting All These Checks.

Eighteen Years Old

A Creative Mess Is Better Than Idle Tidiness.

I Always Feel Very Connected To Canada. My Reference For Everything Is My Canadian Background, My Life In Canada. Particularly On This Issue Of Refugee Immigration: I Couldn't Be Prouder Of Canada.

You Suffer The Blow, But You Capitalize On The Opportunity Left In Its Wake.

I Don't Set A Whole Lot Of Goals. It Smacks A Little Bit Of Will To Me, And I Find That Will Is Not The Way To Go For Me.

You Know What's Cool? My Kids Think I'm Ordinary.

If You Have Doubts About Someone, Lay On A Couple Of Jokes. If He Doesn't Find Anything Funny, Your Radar Should Be Screaming. Then I Would Say Be Patient With People Who Are Negative, Because They're Really Having A Hard Time.

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.

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.

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?

A Lot Of Times, When You Have A Disability, One Of The Things You Deal With Is Other People's Projections Of What Your Experience Is And Their Fear About It, And Not Seeing The Experience You're Having. There's Nothing Horrifying About It To Me. It Is What I Deal With. It Is My Reality And My Life, But It's Not Horrible.

In My 50s I'll Be Dancing At My Children's Weddings.

My Experience Is To Deal With Things Through Humor.

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.

Worst Case Scenario

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