Orson Bean

The only real benefit of being famous is being recognized by head waiters and getting good tables at restaurants. The rest is part ego trip and part inconvenience.

It's wrong to make a living off the theater. Theater should be supported, like redwood trees. You should make your living - whether you're a writer or an actor or a director - in movies or commercials. But you do theater out of love.

People shouldn't get into show business because they want to become stars or become rich; they should get into it because they can't help but put on a show.

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.

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.

Whatever else it was about, the feminist movement had no interest in exploding the myth of the mysterious and wonderful world of business; it simply wanted in on it.

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.

Possessions can possess you. Even a lawn can possess you. It makes you buy a garden hose. Which makes you water. Which cuts into time you might be happier spending some other way.

I don't spend my life making money to spend tomorrow, or to acquire possessions.

I am dedicated to giving my kids the memory of happy parents. So I spend a lot of time with them. We really know each other. If they should decide later on that they hate me, at least they'll know who they're hating.

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.

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.

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 was living in a four-story Manhattan townhouse with three full-time servants and silver to be polished, and I was doing too much. My kids were growing up without me, and suddenly I thought, 'I want some other stuff.' So I stopped working instead of cutting back, and went to Australia instead of Vermont.

I felt only a conservative president could bring peace in Vietnam 'cause he wouldn't be accused of being soft on communism.

I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.

San Francisco is a city; L.A. is a collection of suburbs that have very little in common with one another.

I think God loves to hear little kids laugh at fart jokes. He didn't just make sunsets and bluebirds, He made hot babes. And dirty old men like me. That's the modest message I've set out to tell the world: you don't have to be Ned Flanders to be a Christian.

What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don't give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it's always darkest before the dawn.

I've made a lot of dumb mistakes, but I don't regret them at all.

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.

I'm greedy for experience. I keep finding new things.

Being happy is a revolutionary act; I think it spreads, like ripples in a pond.

I think people are afraid to be original.

War was a way of life for Americans in the early forties. Heroism was expected.

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.

I'm not a pessimist. I do believe that in some way we don't understand, God has a hand in things and it will all work out for America. Our money says In God We Trust. And we are the best country, aren't we?

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.'

Men are attracted to youth and beauty; women are attracted to power.

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.

I'd lived through World War II and hadn't been able to wait to join the army as soon as I turned 18.

God is being siphoned out of the public arena. People don't even say God bless you when you sneeze anymore. I want to be able to lay a Merry Christmas on someone without its feeling like a political statement.

The reason I became a Christian is the same reason I became a conservative: I paid attention.

Strange are the ways of human behavior.

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.

I had come to New York seeking my fortune after a few years of honing my craft as a stand-up on the road.

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.

What is it with me? I seem to be an incorrigible black-listee.

Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.

I don't know anyone who doesn't have an empty spot at the center of him, which must be filled in order to be really happy. That spot, like it or not, is reserved for God.

I didn't want to be famous for its own sake. I wanted to be famous so as to be happy.

For most of my life I didn't believe in God. Who had time?

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.

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.

I made up my mind I was going to walk that thin line between fame and oblivion.

The movies saved my life. I grew up in the great depression, the only child of a pair of star crossed lovers. My father lost his job. My mother drank. They fought. The movies were my escape.

I remember the glory days of film making. I used to go to the movies a lot.