William Shatner Quotes

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

I don't think in terms of God.

I hate flying, flat out hate its guts.

When I was out for the Christmas Holidays in school, I would go skiing up to the mountains and there they had Santa on a sled. Pulled by horses and other reindeer, it was a very, very picturesque time and that struck me very emphatically then and has remained with me all this time.

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

I'm anxious to make another film.

My boy, that was a TV show. I used a stunt double. I always use a stunt double. Except in love scenes. I insist on doing those myself.

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

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

Fate gives you the finger and you accept.

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

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

I have had mystical experiences with horses. I felt they were communicating with me in horse communication.

My mother was born in the city, my dad was an immigrant. Probably from Germany. Could have been Austria, could have been Poland. The borders were changing. My dad brought over a large family of Shatners when he was very young. Scraped together the money, got 11 brothers and sisters a passage on the boat. There's a lot of Shatners in Montreal.

So many dot-com companies were formulated on air.

Let women figure out why they won't sleep with you. Don't do their work for them.

Stop and smell the garlic! That's all you have to do.

Tabloid stuff just offends.

I've come to the conclusion that athletes, when they say they miss the crowd, are not missing the sound of the crowd. What they're missing is the feeling inside that makes the crowd roar. It's not the roar of the crowd, it's the silence inside.

Mysteries simply are a feast for an active mind. And while in my lifetime I've seen science make extraordinary inroads into solving the most complex questions of life, after all this time I admit that I am thrilled that there are some things that forever will remain a mystery. For example, do I wear a toupee?

Divorce is probably as painful as death.

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

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

Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I'm absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I've synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I've been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I've discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.

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.

You might as well aim high. Why shoot yourself in the foot when you can shoot yourself in the head?

If someone criticizes my acting, they may be right.

What have I done? I've blundered my way through life. So I have my picture on the wall. The minute I die, that picture will start to yellow and fade and eventually be gone. Blown in the wind and become part of the molecular structure of something else. These things we see as "success," they're non-accomplishments.

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.

I'm not going to have a tombstone. I'm going to be tossed in the air. Ashes, tossed like a salad.

Somewhere in university, I realized that I hadn't been to classes in months, and I'd get tired to the point of narcolepsy doing anything other than some form of performing, directing, writing, or acting.

Avatar is a watershed movie. We'll always refer to Lawrence of Arabia in the same way. We'll always look at Avatar and say, "That's about as good as it gets." It's an enormous advance, in every way, shape and form, of movie making.

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

Well-written words are music.

I'm so not ready to die. It petrifies me. I go alone. I go to a place I don't know. It might be painful. It might be the end. My thought is that it is the end. I become nameless, and I spent a lifetime being known.

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.

You cannot begin to imagine the shock I had when I came down on the floor for the first time. First of all, there's this whole thing about playing sitcom comedy. I didn't want to do the sitcom thing, but I didn't know what else to do. I went slowly. We went through the week of rehearsal, then we got on the floor with the cameras, which I'm used to because of my experience in the old days. Then came camera day, with an audience, and it was stunning, enthralling, exciting and chaotic. I had never experienced anything like that before, as an actor. I was part minstrel, part actor.

A pretty girl is certainly comparable to a good horse.

Don't be afraid of making an ass of yourself. I do it all the time and look what I got.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

So bitcoin is cyber snob currency ...

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.

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

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.

I slept for four days when I turned 40.

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

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

I don't Twitter. I can't even remember my password name. I have problems with electronics, so what I've done is hire a young man out of college, whose very fingers are the extension of computer keys, and he Twitters. He does the mechanics, but I very carefully modulate what is said and have used Twitter to publicize stuff, have conversations and instigate competition.

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.

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.

I guess the disc jockey thought I was trying to sing or something so ... they had fun with it. But the reality was that it was something, there was a concept behind it.

I believe in taking what happens as inevitable.

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.

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

I have been accused of never saying no.

Memories were the markers of the journey through life. It was necessary to know where you had come from. Only then could you know where you were going.

A series is filled with compromises.

Being an icon is overrated, remember an icon can be moved by a mouse

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

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

There were many times when I kept silent about being Jewish as I got older, when Jewish jokes were told.

I thought I was loved.

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.

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

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

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

Is there a God? There is, but we don't know where. Or who. And, indeed, why.

All any artist can do is please themselves.

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 love cameras but I find myself reluctantly taking pictures because what's past is past.

Everyone knows everything about all of us. That's too much knowledge!

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

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'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.

There's too many people in the world.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

I'm coming little animal!.

Why say "yes"? "Yes" means opportunity. "Yes" makes the dots in your life appear. And if you're willing and open, you can connect these dots. You don't know where these dots are going to lead, and if you don't invest yourself fully, the dots won't connect. The lives you make with those dots always lead to interesting places. "No" closes doors. "Yes" kicks them wide open.....As long as you're able to say "yes", the opportunities keep coming, and with them, the adventures. Say "no" to fear and complacency. Keep saying "yes" and the journey will continue.

Every day I realized I would not be a star.

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

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

I had a major in business, and I graduated with a business degree, but I was perhaps the worst student to graduate from that program.

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.

I'm interested in man's march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me.

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

If there's anything I'm not pompous about, it's myself or my work. But I seem to be able to play it.