 Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too. |
| You get all of your neuroses worked out on stage. I haven't actually played very many nice characters, certainly not on stage. It's not a quality that attracts me. |
| I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that's why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher. |
| Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes. |
| I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well. |
| I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas. |
| I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time. |
| As the captain, I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes, and that was appealing. I wasn't interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around. |
| One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself. |
| Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment. |
| I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them. |
| I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me. |
| Roddenberry had created quite a complex and at times mysterious character. Guarded, cautious, careful in showing his feelings in expressing his ideas about many things - I found that very interesting. |
| For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time. |
| William Shatner has one style. We have completely contrasting personalities. We're very good friends. I adore him, but we're very different people, so they were smart enough to write characters that reflected that. |
| It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward. |
| I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid. |
| During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain's chair. |
| There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation. |
| We had some very distinguished fans: I know one chancellor of a major university who used to schedule his meetings around Star Trek. We were thrilled to discover that Frank Sinatra was a big fan. |
