Best 152 quotes of William Shatner on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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.

One of the advantages of being a captain is being able to ask for advice without necessarily having to take it.

Pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away! I need my pain!

People have an affinity towards things, and you don't know where it comes from. Mozart wrote a symphony when he was four, so it's said; the theory is maybe because his father was a conductor, it happened in vitro, and he heard the music before he was born, and by the age of four he knew how to write music.

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.

So many dot-com companies were formulated on air.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The good life is one that's artistically made.

The great mystery of our consciousness is beyond our grasp.

The idea of being a professional actor never occurred to anybody, including myself, for a long time.

The more powerful the villain is the more powerful the hero.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There's too many people in the world.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire. I like that image. There has to be a unifying theory. I think there is a continuity of some kind, that my love for my wife will go on past the death of my body. Nature is perfect.

We're all embers from the same fire. Our ember winks out, we're ashes, we go back to the fire.

We were basically one and the same, although Jim Kirk was just about perfect, and, of course, I am perfect.

What does God need with a starship?

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.

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

What part of me was born with the courage to stand in front of strangers and risk rejection?

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.

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.

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

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.

Within weeks of our premiere, it became obvious that Leonard [Nimoy] and the character of Spock were becoming something of a national phenomenon. ... And to be unflatteringly frank, it bugged me. ... [Then, Gene Roddenberry] said to me the wisest thing he could possibly have uttered. He said, `Don't ever fear having good and popular people around you, because they can only enhance your own performance. The more you can play to these people, the better the show.'

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

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.

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.

You have to continuously fail. You fail at something, then you get over it, then you fail some more. And after you fail, there's always something new there. And that something new can be really interesting.

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.

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

You need to be silly to be funny.