Quotes By Patrick Stewart

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

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.

The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.

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.

Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

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.

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.

We've heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.

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.

I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.

It still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else.

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

I don't do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you!

During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job.

Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It's one of the reasons I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn't want our make-believe to be exposed.

I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.

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.

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 had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say, 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well.

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.

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.

It wasn't until the first season ended that I went to my first Star Trek convention. It was in Denver. There were two and a half thousand people there.

The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.

For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.

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.

The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.

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.