William Shatner famous quotes

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.
-- William Shatner

#Valentine #School #Cards

I did some professional radio acting as a teenager, and I essentially put myself through college with radio acting in Montreal. When I graduated, I got jobs in professional theatres, repertory, and stock theatres in Canada for a couple of years. And then I went to Stratford, Ontario, where I spent three years with a Shakespeare company. We took a classical play from Stratford to New York City, and I got some good notices there and essentially stayed and did live television. And that brings you to the beginning of filming.
-- William Shatner

#Jobs #New York #Couple

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

#Money #Want #Saving

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.
-- William Shatner

#Actors #Rehearsal #Want

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.
-- William Shatner

#Writing #Discovery #Stories

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.
-- William Shatner

#Horse #Holiday #School

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.
-- William Shatner

#Mean #Appreciate #Listening

The pictures remind you of something that can never be recaptured, the time is gone, the only thing you know is the present. That's all that's knowable and even the present isn't knowable. The present becomes the past... so you really don't know anything.
-- William Shatner

#Past #Gone

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.
-- William Shatner

#Art #Character #Writing

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

#Past #Cameras #Taking Pictures

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

#Sculpture

Christmas is fun anyway. It's a myth organized over the years and gained different mythological qualities as the years go by.
-- William Shatner

#Fun #Years #Quality

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.
-- William Shatner

#May #Facts #Physics

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.
-- William Shatner

#Interesting #Failing #Something New

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.
-- William Shatner

#Baby #Eye #Body

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.
-- William Shatner

#Past #Thinking #Fire

Energy is the key to creativity. Energy is the key to life.
-- William Shatner

#Creativity #Keys #Energy

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.
-- William Shatner

#Mother #Brother #Dad

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

#Beauty #Simple #Blood

I've never been without a dog. I've made trips across the country with a dog. I've been in that angst of loneliness, where you're really alone in the universe, except for the dog.
-- William Shatner

#Country #Dog #Loneliness

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.
-- William Shatner

#Space #Stories #Fiction

I am curious about many things, and find the world around me, and the people and objects and things in it, equally fascinating. There is a great deal of that awe and wonder in me.
-- William Shatner

#People #World #Wonder

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

#Actors #Stage #Performing

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

#Long #Income #Captains

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.
-- William Shatner

#Drama #Texture #Film

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

#Smell #Garlic

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.
-- William Shatner

#Tired #Writing #Class

I love the concept of togetherness and the entwinement of marriage.
-- William Shatner

#Togetherness

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.
-- William Shatner

#Degrees #Students #Graduates

A director is a choreographer, both politically and creatively.
-- William Shatner

#Directors

I proceeded to prove everybody right as to how bad an economics student I was by failing as an assistant manager in every theatre I went to that hired me, both as an assistant manager and as an actor. I lost money and tickets, and I couldn't keep track of anything. So eventually they fired me from assistant-manager jobs, but kept me on as an actor.
-- William Shatner

#Jobs #Track #Theatre

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

#Dog #Horse #Kids

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting. It was a lot of work - anything other than Shakespeare was less work. I had a lot of interesting roles, but I don't point to them and say, "That was more interesting than that," because I don't know what the criteria are.
-- William Shatner

#Fun #Years #Interesting

I think making a good film shot is joyful.
-- William Shatner

#Thinking #Film #Joyful

Even one word, or certainly one sentence, should be able to describe the basic characteristic that the scene has, or the character has, or the story has. And then you begin to detail that one spine, and you have offshoots from that spine, and it becomes more and more complex, but all of it stems from that one-word, one-line theme, which can give the character, the scene, or the play its uniqueness.
-- William Shatner

#Character #Play #Giving

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

#Icons #Remember #Overrated

Your cadence is your music.
-- William Shatner

#Cadence

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

#Inspirational #Success #Hard Work

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.
-- William Shatner

#Good As It Gets #Looks #Shapes

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

#Giving #People #Different Opinions

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.
-- William Shatner

#College #Men #Names

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.
-- William Shatner

#Tree #Curiosity #World

I existed before Star Trek. I started in live television. I was there when the cameras were as big as a table, had internal fans that were whirring and tubes that, because of the heat, had to come right up to our face for a close-up. Now, we are talking about green screen and putting us in locations that we'll never visit. What has happened to us is a miracle, and the miracle is our inventiveness. The tragedy of our lives is also our inventiveness.
-- William Shatner

#Stars #Talking #Miracle

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

#Character #Meat #Bones

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.
-- William Shatner

#Athlete #Missing #Silence

A sense of the unknown has always lured mankind and the greatest of the unknowns of today is outer space. The terrors, the joys and the sense of accomplishment are epitomized in the space program.
-- William Shatner

#Space #Accomplishment #Joy

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

#Looks #Ass

I don't want people to know me. I want them to believe my version.
-- William Shatner

#Believe #People #Want

A pretty girl is certainly comparable to a good horse.
-- William Shatner

#Girl #Horse #Pretty Girl

I've discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.
-- William Shatner

#Creative #Be Creative

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

#Too Much

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.
-- William Shatner

#Boys #Tv Shows #Use

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.
-- William Shatner

#Stars #Book #Quests

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.
-- William Shatner

#Growing Up #Cities #Today

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.
-- William Shatner

#Kids #Emotional #Guilt

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.
-- William Shatner

#Grief #School #Home

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.
-- William Shatner

#Jobs #Men #Doe

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

#Looks #Intrigue #Audience

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

#Quality #Stories #Human Condition

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

#Political #Needs #Scene

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.
-- William Shatner

#Country #People #Population

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

#Thinking #People #Amusing

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.
-- William Shatner

#Character #Guests #Firsts

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

#Prepared

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

#Hurt #Writing #Acceptance

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.
-- William Shatner

#Thinking #Ideas #Use

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.'
-- William Shatner

#Hurt #Essence #Balls

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.
-- William Shatner

#Summer #Kids #Shells

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.
-- William Shatner

#Epic #Aliens #Computer

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.
-- William Shatner

#Discovery #People #Want

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.
-- William Shatner

#Ideas #Pieces #Entertainment

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.
-- William Shatner

#Dream #Pain #Responsibility

Success should always be just beyond your grasp.
-- William Shatner

#Should

What does God need with a starship?
-- William Shatner

#Doe #Needs

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

#Tombstone #Air #Religion

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

#Pain #Taken #Cynical

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.
-- William Shatner

#Fun #Reality #Trying

I think the acting satisfies the need and desire for approval.
-- William Shatner

#Thinking #Appreciate #Desire

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.
-- William Shatner

#Men #Ideas #Space

There was nothing lonelier than a man with a million friends.
-- William Shatner

#Loneliness #Men

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

#Work #Play #Able

My life is my statement and I try to be true to myself and thusly to other people. Whatever my failings are, they are human and I try to perfect it each day.
-- William Shatner

#Life #Perfect #People

I'm coming little animal!.
-- William Shatner

#Animal #Littles

Divorce is simply modern society's version of medieval torture. Except it lasts longer and leaves deeper scars. A divorce releases the most primitive emotions; the ugliest, raw feelings. Emotionally wounded people do their best to inflict pain upon the other party, but rather than using claws they use divorce lawyers.
-- William Shatner

#Pain #Party #Divorce

Youth is the ultimate limited resource.
-- William Shatner

#Limited Resources #Youth #Resources

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

#Character #Proud

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.
-- William Shatner

#Memories #Journey #Journey Through Life

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

#Destiny #Free Will #Conundrums

My dad was good with actions.
-- William Shatner

#Dad #Father #Action

Never buy anything that eats while you sleep.
-- William Shatner

#Sleep

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?
-- William Shatner

#Forever #Mind #Example

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.
-- William Shatner

#Death #Suicide #Might

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

#Sleep #Sexuality #Figures

There's too many people in the world.
-- William Shatner

#People #World #Nonsense

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.'
-- William Shatner

#Philosophical #Character #Play

I think you die the way you live.
-- William Shatner

#Death #Thinking #Dying

Has it ever occurred to you that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life?
-- William Shatner

#Death #Dying #Important

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.
-- William Shatner

#Beautiful #Death #Laughter

Careers are here and they're gone. No matter how great we think we are, we're nothing but the temples of Ozymandias-we're ruins in the making.
-- William Shatner

#Success #Thinking #Careers

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.
-- William Shatner

#Success #Wall #Wind