Patrick Duffy quotes: Bobby Ewing tells us what’s up.
“Good luck happens to people who work hard for it. Sometimes people just fall into the honey pot, but I’ve consistently strived to create whatever good fortune I can get in my life—and consistently strive just as hard not to screw it up once I have it!”
“When it’s offered, think about it, do whatever you do, but don’t let it pass you up if it’s the right thing.”
“I’ve learned to never say never.”
“I certainly don’t succeed all the time, but I try to take inventory at the end of the day and say, ‘Was the total output of my life more positive than negative?'”
“I don’t want to deter anybody from fulfilling every conceivable idea they might have. I live my life that way. I encourage everybody to do their best.”
“My first name was decided because of the day I was born, which happened to be on St. Patrick’s Day. Yep, being born on St. Patrick’s Day seems to have brought me luck and fortune, but I don’t attribute my good fortune to my birthday. It is all due to hard work to get where I am. I’m constantly working to create my own good fortune and once I get it, I work just as hard to keep it.”
“Every person is a stranger and we’re all grateful to be working. That’s the bottom line. And you find out there’s just a ton of people out there doing this work that we love to do.”
“I’m an inherently happy person. It comes from the inside, which means you can achieve happiness under any circumstance.”
“You have to reach a certain age, and then you have to have a sense of humor about yourself, and maybe even a reputation, but you can actually say the most honest things, and have people laugh. Everybody walks away thinking that it was a great experience, and every once in a while you can do that.”
“I think everybody has their own secret, and there’s not an actual formula. My secret is I had to learn how to acquiesce to a certain number of things without feeling like I was giving up, or I was owed something for it, and that was a big transition for me to stop keeping a tally book of, ‘Okay, I did this for you, and now you’d better do this for me,’ or, ‘I gave up this and didn’t do that, so you owe me something.’ Once I got over that—which is really sort of a juvenile way of looking at life: ‘Who gets the bigger half?’—then everything just became as easy as can be.”
“I’m kind of an obsessive-compulsive person. I fall into repetition and routine, possibly too easily.”
“Cooking and eating at home is made even better by the fact that you don’t have to worry about driving after a couple of bottles of very nice wine. For me that’s the ideal combination: working hard and enjoying the fruits of your labor.”
“I come from an alcoholic Irish background. I know where I was going! But I met my wife and started to practice Buddhism, which is a leveling experience for me, and there hasn’t been a day I’ve missed in 40 years. I apply it to everything: to my work and relationships. I try to be a compassionate person.”
“I worked with my dad for 15 years. I apprenticed under him and decided I wanted to become an architect. So I went to college for it and then the acting bug got me.”
“I’ve never turned down a role. I have not gotten roles by virtue of not having succeeded in the audition that went to people that became franchises, but once I saw who did them, I realized I couldn’t have done it that way anyway.”
“Now is the time when it’s hottest for me to go out and establish my thing.”
“I learned to travel, then I traveled to learn.”
“I feel that marrying younger and being quite a young dad helped me with the stability of my career.”
“I lead a normal life and I don’t assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don’t want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I’ve lived.”
“I am too private a person. My private life and my private feelings are exactly that, and if you write a book, it should make you want to be honest. I’ve always had the title of my autobiography, which is What I Choose to Recall. I stole the lyrics from Merle Haggard song. Everything does change, except what you choose to recall. Had I written it, that would have been the title of my autobiography.”
“I think the word ‘closure’ is overrated.”
“I’m one of the lucky actors in television. I don’t make a lot of big waves, but there’s constant activity, and that’s the way I prefer to live my life.”
“Let’s have a good time… give a great message, and then we’ll all go home.”
Related: Victoria Principal quotes.
