Happy Birthday William Shatner!

Gradually the live TV scene simmered out, replaced by film, and that took place in L.A. So many actors left New York.

Ich bin mit der Magie der Disney-Filme aufgewachsen, die letzten Endes dazu geführt haben, dass ich Schauspieler und Produzent werden wollte. Es war diese lustige kleine Comic-Figur mit den großen, runden Ohren, die in meinen Augen etwas Magisches hatte.

Getting that audience approval is always a question mark, and it's always that flag that flutters in front of you.

I am private.

Babies have big heads and big eyes, and tiny little bodies with tiny little arms and legs. So did the aliens at Roswell! I rest my case.

I believe in taking what happens as inevitable.

Here's something pompous - you take your day and artistically create it, so every moment has an artistic flavor.

I can't stand the gossip of celebrities' lives, all the time! Every minute!

Regret is the worst human emotion. If you took another road, you might have fallen off a cliff. I'm content.

I can't type. Can't do it.

And I enjoyed the celebrity and the creativity that was involved in Star Trek.

I did a movie in Esperanto.

Energy is the key to creativity. Energy is the key to life.

I don't know how to deal with being 80.

I think making a good film shot is joyful.

I don't read reviews.

I love the concept of togetherness and the entwinement of marriage.

 I don't think in terms of God.

My wife and my three kids and my grandchildren are my life, but my horses and my dogs are everything else. 

I don't watch television.

I believe that when things happen, they happen with a purpose.

I never watched 'Star Trek.' 

The ability to breathe the air and drink the water will be what the wars will be about from here on in. And it's coming with alarming rapidity.

I played comedies and dramas.

You need to be silly to be funny.

I see myself as an actor with a love of music.

I was built for the long run, not for the short dash, I guess.

I spent years doing 'Star Trek' bits and things, and a lot of people loved it, a lot of people mocked it.

How do I stay so healthy and boyishly handsome? It's simple. I drink the blood of young runaways.

I think the acting satisfies the need and desire for approval.

My understanding is, the fans are so ravenous in Canada, they gnaw on the stars.

I thought I was loved.

No, I don't regret anything at this point. That may change on the next phone call, but at the moment I don't regret anything. 

 I'm a performer, comedian, entertainer, writer and director.

I envy the people who say, 'oh, well, I've got my name in the golden book and I'm going to be entered into the pearly gates.'

I'm an optimist.

I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.

 I'm anxious to make another film.

A director is a choreographer, both politically and creatively.

I'm just quizzical about how things work and why things are.

The good life is one that's artistically made.

I've been approached to do some things with astronauts and the preparation that astronauts go through.

Ads need to be little pieces of entertainment.

 I've been breeding Dobies for years. Almost won the breed in Westminster at one time.

Remember - you can't beam through a force field. So, don't try it.

I've got rock 'n' roll in my blood.

I know is that I am constantly intrigued by something I'm doing.

I've never not appeared in front of a live audience for any longer period than a month or two.

You have to create your life. You have to carve it, like a sculpture.

If someone criticizes my acting, they may be right.

All in all, Kirk's character is something I am very proud of.

My dad died of a stroke.

The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.

My dad was good with actions.

At 40, I went to bed for three days. I thought my life is over.

No matter how prosaic something is that you've done and been a part of again and again, there is so much more there that you haven't seen.

This is my saddest story: In grade school, they would have us open our Valentine's cards and read them out loud. I always sent cards to myself because nobody else did.

Tabloid stuff just offends.

Death is an absolute marvel.

The actor is in the hands of a lot of other people, over which he has no control.

 What is down will go up. At the same time, you have to be prepared for what is up to go down.

The problem is I don't know anything or anyone. I am so focused on the immediate picture in front of me.

I also derive a great deal of pleasure from horses and dogs... the ocean... and love.

There's too many people in the world.

You and I and everybody in show business and the entertainment industry fly by the seat of our pants. We don't know quite what is going to happen. William Shatner Business, Fly, Happen I frequently dream of being on these horses' backs and running across a field. And the horse and I are one.

Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that 'This is going to be terrific' and 'This is the best thing I've ever done' and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it's good or bad.

I didn't want to do the sitcom thing, but I didn't know what else to do.

There's a joy and a pain about directing where the dreams you have are becoming concrete but the attention to detail, the need for time is such that it's overwhelming at times, and the stream of responsibility.

Most people, including myself, keep repeating the same mistakes.

I don't know how I got to this point but it must be as a result of everything that has come before so if I were to change something, I might not be at this point now.

I don't think of myself as being tied. 

I know very little about the viral, electronic world, but I use Twitter to communicate not only information that I think some of the fans want to hear about but also ideas.

There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.

I watch movies and sports. I can count on the fingers of my hand the number of times I have watched an hour show. I never watch a half-hour show, and I never watch myself. 

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting.

If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.

I find age such a foreign concept. I have to be reminded. I still have the extraordinary feeling of adventure, striking out into unknown fields.

In entertainment, whether it's movies or television or whatever, I'm a great audience, but I don't remember the names of the people I've seen or the groups that I've heard.

I like making people laugh. It comes off and shines in everything I do.

Spencer Tracy was a man who did very much what I do on a set, and that is, he comes down and he does his job, and then he goes back to his dressing room. 

If saving money is wrong, I don't want to be right!

Voice acting is very interesting, I've done several animated projects, and you have to make the voice reflect the character and try and do as much with a word as you can with a look in a live-action film.

I've blundered my way through life.

With three kids, it was always very, very tight, and it was always a scramble for what was my next job. So I learned never to go into debt because I don't want those monthly payments to preoccupy my thoughts.

The name Shatner is Austrian and partly Germanic, and there's Germanic reticence and silence perhaps, but there is passion underneath.

If I'm given an opportunity to do something, I do it. Or else I fool around with it.

I'm always open to the possibility that somebody's got a better idea than I have. It happens with some frequency.

If we can clean up our world, I'll bet you we can achieve warp drive.

The essence of paint ball is the fact that when you get hit by a ball full of paint, it hurts just enough to say, 'Ow, I gotta get out of the way,' but not enough to say, 'I quit.'

In my proudest moments, I think I had a real hand in the creative force of making 'Star Trek.' But most of the time, I don't think about it.

The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling. 

My fear is dying badly, through illness or injury. But what a glorious demise it would be to burn up in space.

I love horses. There's something practical and mystical about them.

Nature is perfect.

We meet aliens every day who have something to give us. They come in the form of people with different opinions.

So many dot-com companies were formulated on air. 

I love living in Los Angeles.

The only subject I know anything about is myself and I don't know that too clearly.

Over the years, I've become barraged by comments from people, such as, 'Beam me up, Scotty!' and I became defensive. I felt they were derisive and engendered an attitude. I am grateful for the success, but didn't want to be mocked.

The political scene is already so turgid, it doesn't need more of that from me.

I love to evoke the bones and meat and thoughts of characters.

These people who come to Comic-Con and dress up - all across the country, the rest of the population who doesn't understand are scoffing at them. 

Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.

Well-written words are music.

I love to go to a movie, get a Diet Coke and a barrel of popcorn, and sit there with my kids and watch a film.

When I'm interviewing somebody I don't work from prepared questions. 

Why does the lizard stick his tongue out? The lizard sticks its tongue out because that's the way its listening and looking and tasting its environment. It's its means of appreciating what's in front of it.

But if you want to know the truth, the weirdest thing that has happened has been my discovery that people who attend the conventions are filled with love.

It's very easy to say no to leaving the house.

The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that's the appeal of science fiction.

I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?

 I was always working. Maybe you weren't aware of the movies I was making, or the television I was doing, or the shows I was creating, or the books I was writing; there have been thirty. But I have always been solidly at work, running as fast as I can.

My plan has always been to return to Broadway every 50 years.

We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.

Divorce is probably as painful as death.

Instead of playing something heavily, I play it lightly. Since people like to cast cyclically, once you've done one thing, people want to put you in that bag again. And since I want to work, I let it happen.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

When you've done the technical part, you're then into the joy, the zen, into being. Technology no longer exists for you. You're then into the mystery of the thing you're doing.

A tree you pass by every day is just a tree. If you are to closely examine what a tree has and the life a tree has, even the smallest thing can withstand a curiosity, and you can examine whole worlds.

Things people say strike me as amusing, and I am prone to saying out loud what everybody's thinking. 

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

My mother was an exuberant, silly lady.

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition. 

When I direct and have to look at filmed scenes of myself, I suck.

I'm gonna reveal something to you that's going to come as a shock: If you're a stupid young man, you're usually a stupid old man. Most people, including myself, keep repeating the same mistakes.

A stage actor has to be 10% aware of the audience as he's performing.

If you make a fool of yourself, you can do it with dignity, without taking your pants down. And if you do take your pants down, you can still do it with dignity.

I'm not out to convince anybody of anything.

It was the early 1970s and I was recently divorced. I had three kids and was totally broke. I managed to find work back east on the straw-hat circuit - summer stock - but couldn't afford hotels, so I lived out of the back of my truck, under a hard shell.

Fate gives you the finger and you accept.

The longer I go about living, I see it's the relationship that is most meaningful. 

I enjoyed reading all the classic authors like Isaac Asimov and Bradbury.

Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene - but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

Captain Kirk has been a source of pleasure and income for a long time.

I think that prog rock is the science fiction of music. Science fiction speculates on what the future might be and look like and how we'll get there, and yet there's always a central theme of humanity, or there should be. Progressive rock has the same concept of exploration into the parts of the music world that hasn't been explored.

I am not a Starfleet commander, or T.J. Hooker. I don't live on Starship NCC-1701, or own a phaser. And I don't know anybody named Bones, Sulu, or Spock.

Nobody could have imagined the phenomenon that 'Star Trek' became. It's still almost impossible to imagine.

I sometimes find that in interviews you learn more about yourself than the person learned about you.

I'm looking for the perfect paintball movie.

I didn't realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It's not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.

When there are tiers of meaning in an ad it intrigues the audience and they look for it again and again.

Writing an acceptance speech gives you the expectation of winning, and you are therefore devastated or hurt if you didn't win.

Exercise? A Jew doesn't exercise.

I love technology. Matches, to light a fire, is really high tech. The wheel is really one of the great inventions of all time. Other than that, I am an ignoramus about technology.

A series is filled with compromises.

Acting is easier - writing is more creative. The lazy man vies with the industrious.

All any artist can do is please themselves.

I see people putting text messages on the phone or computer and I think, 'Why don't you just call?'

I hate flying, flat out hate its guts.

I'm surfing the giant life wave.

I have been accused of never saying no.

I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners, and that's really hard work. 

I'm not technically adept at music, but I'd love to be part of a discussion of where progressive rock ends and country music begins.

I often conduct interviews in my truck.

It's irksome to read about someone I don't recognize. It frightens me.

I've never been without a dog. I've made trips across the country with a dog.

My name is William Shatner, and I am Canadian!

My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.

My site has the whole thing - blogs, information, video interviews. 

My beautiful wife is dead. She meant everything to me. Her laughter, her tears and her joy will remain with me the rest of my life.

When I did the film Generations, in which the character died, I felt like a guest for the first time. That made me very sad.

Success is different for everyone; everybody defines it in their own way, and that's part of what we do in 'Close Up', finding what it was each person wanted to achieve and what their willingness to sacrifice for that was.

Yeah, I do stand-up, my own type of stand-up.

Marriage is a reflection of your life in general: how you treat people, how you argue, how secure you are in your own thoughts. How vehemently do you argue your point of view? With what disdain do you view the other's point of view?

Although I'm a business major out of McGill University, I know nothing... but then I found out much later in life, nobody knows anything.

Success should always be just beyond your grasp.

Every day I realized I would not be a star. 

I think the supernatural is a catch-all for everything we don't understand about the vast other parts of life that we cannot perceive.

Everybody has their 15 minutes, and those 15 minutes should be spent in a private limo and a private plane. It's the ultimate.