Patrick Stewart quotes:

During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain's chair.

William Shatner has one style. We have completely contrasting personalities. We're very good friends. I adore him, but we're very different people, so they were smart enough to write characters that reflected that.

Having played many roles of scientific intellect I do have an empathy for that world. It's been hard on me because flying the Enterprise for seven years in Star Trek and sitting in Cerebro in X-men has led people to believe that I know what I'm talking about. But I'm still trying to work out how to operate the air conditioning unit on my car.

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas.

We've heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.

I wasn't campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you've got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time.

I don't do impersonations. I can do a wounded elephant! I can do a really good cow! And because of the amount of time I spent in North Yorkshire, I do a variety of sheep. All of which I will be happy to roll out for you!

I saw Waiting for Godot when I was 17 in rep with a then unknown actor called Peter O'Toole playing Vladimir. I remember leaving the theatre promising myself that one day I would have a go at this play and then pretty much forgot it for 50 years.

I am told that there have been over the years a number of experiments taking place in places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology that have been entirely based on concepts raised by Star Trek.

There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation.

I wouldn't know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me.

I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair.

Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain's ready room died it was always a sad moment.

As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

I've met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it's just not worth working with them.

Roddenberry had created quite a complex and at times mysterious character. Guarded, cautious, careful in showing his feelings in expressing his ideas about many things - I found that very interesting.

The knights of the theater represented to me not only the pinnacle of the profession but the esteem in which the profession was held. To find myself, to my astonishment, in that company is the grandest thing that has professionally happened to me.

I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.

Having spent so much of my life with Shakespeare's world, passions and ideas in my head and in my mouth, he feels like a friend - someone who just went out of the room to get another bottle of wine.

As a child, I heard in my home doctors and ambulance men say, 'Mrs. Stewart, you must've done something to provoke him.' 'Mrs. Stewart, it takes two to make an argument.' Wrong. Wrong! My mother did nothing to provoke that - and even if she had, violence is never ever a choice that a man should make. Ever.

You get all of your neuroses worked out on stage. I haven't actually played very many nice characters, certainly not on stage. It's not a quality that attracts me.

Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes.

During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that's all. It was part of our job.

It is what you do from now on that will either move our civilization forward a few tiny steps, or else... begin to march us steadily backward.

It's not just an exclamation, but it's a rejection of everything to do with Christmas, with the spirit of Christmas, with gift-giving, with generosity.

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilizations out onto other planets, even though they may be utterly uninhabited.

I made a promise to myself that I would try to introduce something unexpected in every single episode of the series. It was largely to amuse myself as much as anything. I didn't ever want the audience to feel that they knew everything.

Comedy today is not what it was years ago. It's always changing, in particular to female comics. No longer are certain subjects considered to be a male preserve. Women can talk about sexuality and their bodily functions and it can be very, very entertaining. It's changed the impact of comedy acting.

The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.

Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?

I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well.

One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.

If someone says 'Give me one word of advice,' I say 'be fearless.' And knowing without any shadow of a doubt that what they have to give - who they are - is totally unique and not shared by anybody else. And to believe in that uniqueness. It took me decades before I developed courage as an actor.

Last Wednesday, I stupidly dropped my iPhone in the bath, and my life has sort of spiraled almost out of control.

I certainly wanted to maintain some sense of mystery about Picard and that's why we never allowed certain situations to fully evolve, like the relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher.

I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say, 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well.

We had some very distinguished fans: I know one chancellor of a major university who used to schedule his meetings around Star Trek. We were thrilled to discover that Frank Sinatra was a big fan.

The truth of the matter is, all of those guys on Star Trek: The Next Generation actually want to be me. These impersonations they do are just some way of trying to feel what it must be like to be me. And I understand that! Because it feels really good to be Patrick Stewart!

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

The only still center of my life is Macbeth. To go back to doing this bloody, crazed, insane mass-murderer is a huge relief after trying to get my cell phone replaced.

Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It's one of the reasons I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn't want our make-believe to be exposed.

It wasn't until the first season ended that I went to my first Star Trek convention. It was in Denver. There were two and a half thousand people there.

I've often reflected on this in the past weeks as I've been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.

It still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else.

All I ever wanted to do was be on stage, if possible acting in Shakespeare. And to be as good as I could be.There was nowhere else I wanted to go. TV was of no interest. Films were just a fantasy. Yet I was convinced that when we found ourselves in that world of fantasy and sci-fi, it was our classical background and our training that equipped us for that larger-than life-world.

And from the first moment that I ever walked on stage in front of a darkened auditorium with a couple of hundred people sitting there, I was never afraid, I was never fearful, I didn't suffer from stage fright, because I felt so safe on that stage. I wasn't Patrick Stewart, I wasn't in the environment that frightened me, I was pretending to be someone else, and I liked the other people I pretended to be. So I felt nothing but security for being on stage. And I think that's what drew me to this strange job of playing make-believe.

As the captain, I was going to be having the dominant role in most of the episodes, and that was appealing. I wasn't interested in coming to Hollywood to sit around.

At 12 years old in the dangerous world that I was in, with a very difficult home life, I found the stage was the safest place to be. It was predetermined and predictable - and furthermore you got to be someone else. All the problems only began when you left the building.

Creating a believable world on the ship was very important, and technically they got better and better and better at showing the ship too.

For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time.

I do what I do in my mother's name because I couldn't help her then. Now I can.

I heard police or ambulancemen, standing in our house, say, 'She must have provoked him,' or, 'Mrs Stewart, it takes two to make a fight.' They had no idea. The truth is my mother did nothing to deserve the violence she endured. She did not provoke my father, and even if she had, violence is an unacceptable way of dealing with conflict. Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.

I like things that are funny - in everyday conversation, in incidents that you see, in watching TV or watching film. Comedy has always had an impact on my life.

I think I came back from America a funnier and nicer person than I went.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I'd thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic.

Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be a serious classical actor, you must be as fit as an athlete. For me, the breakthrough was going to live in California. I exercised. I drank less. It was one of the things about California that had a positive impact on me.

So far as education is concerned, it has had a significant impact on a lot of young people who turn to science as a much more exciting and interesting study than they otherwise might have found, entirely as a result of becoming involved with Star Trek.

There's no such thing as "just a domestic".

Violence against women is learned. Each of us must examine - and change - the way in which our own behavior might contribute to, enable, ignore or excuse all such forms of violence. I promise to do so, and to invite other me and allies to do the same.

Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation,

Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.

Violence is never ever a choice that a man should make.

We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again! The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!

What identifies an individual as a king is how other people behave towards him. All authority is assumed, and if other people don't accept your authority then you don't have it. Perhaps the critical thing to being a convincing figure of authority is actually not to try too hard.

Where can I go that would give me the same level of satisfaction as an actor?

The people who could do most to improve the situation of so many women and children are in fact, men,

When I'm meant to be standing in the wings, the only way to go is the ladies' toilets. It's the only time I've ever acted in the toilets.

An obsession might be a little strong a term, but it has now become one of the most significant aspects of my life, but most importantly of my career, because it has changed the public's perception of who Patrick Stewart is,