Time & Perspective Quote by Hal Linden

There is a quietly radical work ethic hiding in Hal Linden's matter-of-fact refusal to run it back. For an actor best known for a long-running, high-visibility role, this isn't the glamorous "artist chasing inspiration" line; it's a pragmatic admission about diminishing returns. "Plumbed 90 percent" is the key phrase: it treats a character less like an identity to inhabit forever and more like a system you can map. Once the major rooms have been entered, the remaining 10 percent isn't necessarily depth - it might be habit, polish, comfort. And comfort, for a working actor, can be its own kind of creative malpractice.

The intent reads like self-preservation. Repetition can turn performance into maintenance, and maintenance is where curiosity goes to die. By framing repetition as having already extracted most of what's there, Linden sidesteps ego. He's not claiming the role is beneath him; he's claiming he's done an honest accounting of what he can responsibly offer before he starts recycling gestures. That "let's move on" has the cadence of someone who knows the industry rewards familiarity, yet chooses the anxiety of being new anyway.

Context matters: television stardom often pressures actors to become their characters, to monetize recognizability. Linden pushes back with a craftsman's logic - the job is not to be remembered, it's to keep discovering. Starting "from scratch" isn't naïveté; it's a disciplined preference for risk, the only reliable way to stay alive inside work that can easily calcify.