Mark Sheppard quotes:

John Adams was a farmer, Abraham Lincoln a small town lawyer. Plato and Socrates were teachers. Jesus was a carpenter. To equate wisdom and judgement with occupation is at best insulting.

I think people do sci-fi a huge disservice by lumping it as some sort of bizarre subculture genre when I think everybody's lives are impacted by sci-fi at some point.

It's a fascinating job, to come in and be the most interesting person in an episode. Whoever the guest star is, that's the job - to maintain the interest and the focus for that 42 minutes or whatever, and it should be a huge relief to those people that are the leads in the shows.

When you're shooting a movie that's not necessarily a huge budget, you have to think about what you can leave out and still make it interesting.

I can go to a movie theater and watch a movie I was in with an audience... but with television, the opportunity to meet the fans at Comic Con or any other situation, it's a chance to enter that circle; it's that sharing.

Hitting your head against a wall is not the fastest way to move it.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

I've been lucky enough to work with some of the best TV directors there are, and I've learned from how they had to handle when things don't go quite according to plan.

Simplicity is the pursuit of the essential.

Tell me something I can dance to.

The defenders of the status quo often masquerade as the preservers of harmony.

It seems to realize itself to be some of the most exciting TV and films that are made. Sci-fi just has that ability.

With sci-fi you get these kind of stories in historical drama, and it's just so fabulous.

The idea of future or past, either way, is a core part of entertainment. It's something we've always loved as humans. Its part of our psyche, I think.

If a person is dying of cancer, you do not say, 'You can't turn back the clock.' You try to heal the person, no matter how painful the process.

Just when you think you're playing your cards right, God shuffles the deck.

The opposite of simplicity is not complexity, but fragmentation and alienation.

We are all riding on the same bus.

The lessons we learn, we must learn again and again.