Top 199 Quotes & Sayings by Michael J. Fox

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian actor Michael J. Fox.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Michael J. Fox

Michael Andrew Fox, known professionally as Michael J. Fox, is a retired Canadian-American actor. Beginning his career in the 1970s, he first rose to prominence for portraying Alex P. Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties (1982–1989). Fox is most famous for his role as protagonist Marty McFly in the Back to the Future film trilogy (1985–1990), which became a critical and commercial success. He went on to headline several films throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including Teen Wolf (1985), The Secret of My Success (1987), Casualties of War (1989), Doc Hollywood (1991), and The Frighteners (1996). Fox returned to television on the ABC sitcom Spin City, in which he portrayed the lead role of Mike Flaherty from 1996 to 2000.

By the time I entered high school, I had forsaken academics altogether in favor of my burgeoning acting career.
The least amount of judging we can do, the better off we are.
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. — © Michael J. Fox
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 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.
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.
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Discipline is just doing the same thing the right way whether anyone's watching or not.
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. — © Michael J. Fox
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.
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.
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.
No matter how much money you have, you can lose it.
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.
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.
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?
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.
What other people think about me is not my business.
I've never gotten up to see something one of my kids wanted to show me and not been rewarded.
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.
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.
One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.
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.
The only thing worse than an opportunity you don't deserve is blowing an opportunity.
Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices, there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
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.
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.
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 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.
I worked very hard on those movies but there was some creative connection that wasn't being made.
I can't always control my body the way I want to, and I can't control when I feel good or when I don't. I can control how clear my mind is. And I can control how willing I am to step up if somebody needs me.
My wife is Jewish, and therefore, it's my children's birthright to be Jewish.
Pity is a benign form of abuse.
I have a remarkably normal life. — © Michael J. Fox
I have a remarkably normal life.
Everybody in the world knew who I was before I knew who I was.
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.
I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked.
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.
I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.
I think the scariest person in the world is the person with no sense of humor.
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 see possibilities in everything. For everything that's taken away, something of greater value has been given.
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. — © Michael J. Fox
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.
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.
Pain is temporary, film is forever.
Tracy is more a help to me than I am to her.
After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.
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.
Pity is just another form of abuse.
I love the irony. I'm perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.
Family is not an important thing. It's everything.
The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.
In my 50s I'll be dancing at my children's weddings.
I'm going to marry a Jewish woman because I like the idea of getting up Sunday morning and going to the deli.
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'.
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