Fred Melamed Quotes

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a ‘coat’, which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

I have two young children with autism. What could they have ever done to deserve that? What kind of a God allows the innocent to suffer? It’s a mystery. Yet still, I believe in God.

I am tolerably ignorant about Judaism, and much of what I do know about it seems hard to swallow, because it is so grounded in legalism, and adherence to rituals.

I always did plays in school because I thought it was fun, but it just never occurred to me as a thing to do.

I’ve always thought that, in a sense, the more specific and sometimes even the smaller the world of a movie is, the more universal it is.

I don’t really know of the Jewish tradition of comedy, only the Jewish tradition of not keeping your mouth shut. Complaining about all that is hard, unfair or ridiculous in life-having strong feelings, and not being able to suppress them. That, to me, is Jewish.

In my career, I’ve had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.

I’d always admired Diane Keaton, but I’d never met her.

We must agree to live in this world, with all that is unfair about it, without knowing why, if we wish to have a God in our lives.

I’m one of relatively few stage-trained actors who doesn’t much like acting on stage. It feels kind of like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island, which I did when I was eight. When it was all over, I was glad I had done it, but most of the time when it was actually happening, I was just kind of hanging on for dear life.

It’s funny, but three of my early films were with Liam Neeson, before Liam Neeson was a big star.

I was always around people who were in the business from the time I was an absolute baby. I grew up in New York City, and my parents, my sister, and I had a house on Fire Island, and they were part of a set of people that were all close and friendly, most of whom were involved in show business in one regard or another. So it was always familiar to me, and I kind of enjoyed it.