"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business."
— Michael J. Fox

""Happiness is a decision.""
— Michael J. Fox

"what other people think of me is not my business."
— Michael J. Fox

"A creative mess is better than idle tidiness."
— Michael J. Fox

""When prescribing one of the drugs I take, my doctor warned me of a common side effect: exaggerated, intensely vivid dreams. To be honest, I've never really noticed the difference. I've always dreamt big.""
— Michael J. Fox

"My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations."
— Michael J. Fox

"One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered."
— Michael J. Fox

"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business. "
— Michael J. Fox

"My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy."
— Michael J. Fox (Lucky Man: A Memoir)

"'I'm glad I don't have a drinking problem,' I confided, 'because I don't think I'd ever be able to quit.'"
— Michael J. Fox (Lucky Man: A Memoir)

"I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day - it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning."
— Michael J. Fox (Lucky Man: A Memoir)

"And the second [thing about the CBS EVENING NEWS that stands out in the mind of Michael J. Fox] was something Katie did later in the interview, as the drugs kicked in and the tremors segued into the jerkiness of dyskinesias. Somewhere in the contortions of making a point, my left arm detached the microphone clip from my jacket lapel. With no fuss and hardly a break in conversation or eye contact, she calmly leaned over and refastened it. Neither of us commented on it, but it was such an empathetic gesture, so far from anything patronizing or pitying, a simple kindness that allowed me the dignity to carry on making a point more important than the superficiality of my physical circumstance...

...One thing was abundantly clear though, whether or not she was able to forget how much she liked me: with that single act of consideration, she made it abundantly clear how much she loved her father."
— Michael J. Fox

""He gave life to the breath- oxygen, a simple gas, he transferred into words, ideas, hope.""
— Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)

"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business. "
— Michael J. Fox

"It never occurred to me that any of these pleasures were a reward for being a pretty good kid, any more than I needed to restructure my life just to avoid an eternity of being spit-roasted on a subterranean barbecue. If this sounds flip, smug, or disrespectful, it's not meant to be. Obviously, there is great wisdom, beauty, and relevance in millennia worth of collected theological teaching from around the world. The question I'm grappling with is: why didn't these big themes and major stick-and-carrot extremes resonate with me? I just never bought into the concept. Maybe I'm part of a small minority, but I don't think so. "
— Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)

"Chris[topher] Reeve wisely parsed the difference between optimism and hope. Unlike optimism, he said, 'Hope is the product of knowledge and the projection of where the knowledge can take us.'"
— Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)

"I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06.

By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken.

Just as I'd hoped."
— Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)