Top 60 Mandy Patinkin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love my work, I love the people I work with, I do the best I can.”

— Mandy Patinkin

2. “If you stand too close to a painting – all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can’t see any of the detail.”

— Mandy Patinkin

3. “Everything I am came from my parents. I don’t take that much credit for who I am and what I am.”

— Mandy Patinkin

4. “Sondheim is the Shakespeare of the musical theater world.”

— Mandy Patinkin

5. “Everything I experience influences everything I do.”

— Mandy Patinkin

6. “There’s not a lot of money in revenge.”

— Mandy Patinkin

7. “I would go to war with words, not weapons. I would die talking before I lifted a weapon.”

— Mandy Patinkin

8. “Our actions are the ground we walk on.”

— Mandy Patinkin

9. “My dream has come true, now that I have passed it on.”

— Mandy Patinkin

10. “Well, I’m not a critic, I’m just a worker. So, I’m always grateful for anything the critics say – good or bad.”

— Mandy Patinkin

11. “I believe there’s a common ground in what all gifted writers write. It has to do with their wish to turn darkness into light.”

— Mandy Patinkin

12. “My life exists in an imagined reality.”

— Mandy Patinkin

13. “The great love of my life is music.”

— Mandy Patinkin

14. “Actually, the language in Shakespeare is wonderfully musical. You need to hear the music to connect with the words.”

— Mandy Patinkin

15. “Who is the bad guy? Is America possibly the bad guy?”

— Mandy Patinkin

16. “I’ve been very blessed in my personal life and in my career and I have never been ungrateful for what I have.”

— Mandy Patinkin

17. “The best work I can do is to take myself as much as I can out of it and get it as simple as I can.”

— Mandy Patinkin

18. “I’m blessed. I have a 13-year-old girl’s eye and a 14 year-old boy’s eye. I’ve been given the gift of sight by people who decided to donate organs. I try to do as much organ-donor work as I can.”

— Mandy Patinkin

19. “If we can’t keep our Palestinian neighbors and Muslim neighbors alive with good water and fresh air, we’ll never get them to the peace table.”

— Mandy Patinkin

20. “Now get in the cartoonishly evil vehicle and drive!”

— Mandy Patinkin

21. “In my prayers every day, which are a combination of Hebrew prayers and Shakespeare and Sondheim lyrics and things people have said to me that I’ve written down and shoved in my pocket, I also say the name of every person I’ve ever known who’s passed on.”

— Mandy Patinkin

22. “Everyone’s entitled to their own experience.”

— Mandy Patinkin

23. “My sense of religion is Einstein’s sense of relativity. I don’t believe in God. I believe that energy never dies. So the possibility exists that you might be breathing in some other form of Moses or Buddha or Muhammad or Bobby Kennedy or Roosevelt or Martin Luther King or Jesus.”

— Mandy Patinkin

24. “Comparison leads to violence.”

— Mandy Patinkin

25. “I’m just an actor. I am nothing special.”

— Mandy Patinkin

26. “I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I’m lucky.”

— Mandy Patinkin

27. “People who go into the arts are often hurt people. Many are manic-depressive. Some have tried suicide and some have succeeded. It’s just part of the game. We are people who are oversensitive. That’s why we’re in this business, because of our need to communicate.”

— Mandy Patinkin

28. “I think we all lose in the end because we don’t get to stay here forever.”

— Mandy Patinkin

29. “My mom was a great cook and great baker all her life.”

— Mandy Patinkin

30. “My wife will tell you that if you feel my hands before I walk on for a performance, you could chill a bottle of wine.”

— Mandy Patinkin

31. “The time it takes to get something done is the time it takes.”

— Mandy Patinkin

32. “I desperately want to see the day today and do the best I can not miss a shred of sunlight. It’ll be over before I know it.”

— Mandy Patinkin

33. “It is a game, the whole ball of wax is a game – your life, my life, politics, economy, hunger...”

— Mandy Patinkin

34. “People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it’s on a TV show or in the real world.”

— Mandy Patinkin

35. “I don’t want people to sit and process the song. I want them to just let them bathe over them.”

— Mandy Patinkin

36. “I got married because I wanted to do something that was more than I understood, because my feelings were more than I understood.”

— Mandy Patinkin

37. “My inner motivation is to make the world a better place; the bad guy and the good guy think the same thing.”

— Mandy Patinkin

38. “Peace in the Middle East isn’t going to be created by another war or violent act on the other side.”

— Mandy Patinkin

39. “One of the greatest gifts that ‘Homeland’ has given me is it’s affirming on a daily basis.”

— Mandy Patinkin

40. “If you’re sick, watch funny movies.”

— Mandy Patinkin

41. “There’s something about singing that I just love. It makes me feel freer than anything in the world.”

— Mandy Patinkin

42. “Singing in Yiddish was a great thrill for me and came about through Joe Papp, the founder of The Public Theater.”

— Mandy Patinkin

43. “I’m an obsessive person. I like intensity.”

— Mandy Patinkin

44. “When I’m on the road with concerts, people ask me to autograph my CDs, but more and more they come up with the cookbooks.”

— Mandy Patinkin

45. “This is unbearable how I talk.”

— Mandy Patinkin

46. “During ‘Chicago Hope,’ I never let directors talk to me, because I was so spoiled. I started off with people like Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, James Lapine, unbelievably gifted people. So there I was, saying, ‘Don’t talk to me, I don’t want your opinion.’ I behaved abominably.”

— Mandy Patinkin

47. “I’m on the board of directors for Peace Now, which works tirelessly between the Palestinians and the Israelis to create peace in the Middle East and we’ve never been closer.”

— Mandy Patinkin

48. “I try to get that across in the work, to try to, if I’m lucky, to make this world a little bit better for all of us before I check out. And that’s if I’m lucky, I don’t always get to have that privilege but I try always.”

— Mandy Patinkin

49. “Some teachers should be put in prison for the way they either take advantage of women in their classes or destroy fragile egos. Be careful who you ask to help you when you’re in the arts.”

— Mandy Patinkin

50. “I’m Jewish and I can sing and I’m alive.”

— Mandy Patinkin