William Shatner's Quotes

Death is an absolute marvel.

Every day I realized I would not be a star.

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

Fate gives you the finger and you accept.

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

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

I am private.

I believe in taking what happens as inevitable.

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

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

I did a movie in Esperanto.

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

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

I don't think in terms of God.

I don't think of myself as being tied.

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

I hate flying, flat out hate its guts.

I have been accused of never saying no.

I have tinnitus.

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

I never watched 'Star Trek.'

I often conduct interviews in my truck.

I played comedies and dramas.

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

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

I thought I was loved.

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

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

I'm anxious to make another film.

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

I'm surfing the giant life wave.

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

I've blundered my way through life.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

My dad died of a stroke.

My dad was good with actions.

My mother was an exuberant, silly lady.

My name is William Shatner, and I am Canadian!

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

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

Nature is perfect.

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.

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

So many dot-com companies were formulated on air.

Success should always be just beyond your grasp.

Tabloid stuff just offends.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Well-written words are music.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.