Michael J. Fox

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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'.

I often say now I don't have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson's, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.

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.

Always be available to your kids. Because if you say, 'Give me five minutes, give me ten minutes,' it'll be 15, it'll be 20. And then when you get there, the shine will have worn off whatever it is they wanted to share with you.

Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.

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.

Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.

I don't look at myself as a leader. I do look at myself as part of a community.

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.

I really love being alive. I love my family and my work. I love the opportunity I have to do things. That's what happiness is.

I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting.

My whole life, meeting people is like a blind date, because I feel like they've already seen the video on me.

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.

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.