Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Instead of playing something heavily, I play it lightly. Since people like to cast cyclically, once you've done one thing, people want to put you in that bag again. And since I want to work, I let it happen.
With three kids, it was always very, very tight, and it was always a scramble for what was my next job. So I learned never to go into debt because I don't want those monthly payments to preoccupy my thoughts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Success is different for everyone; everybody defines it in their own way, and that's part of what we do in 'Close Up', finding what it was each person wanted to achieve and what their willingness to sacrifice for that was.
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!
Over the years, I've become barraged by comments from people, such as, 'Beam me up, Scotty!' and I became defensive. I felt they were derisive and engendered an attitude. I am grateful for the success, but didn't want to be mocked.
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.
Marriage is a reflection of your life in general: how you treat people, how you argue, how secure you are in your own thoughts. How vehemently do you argue your point of view? With what disdain do you view the other's point of view?
I got on a horse when I was about 12 years of age, and started galloping around. my mother came up said "where did you learn to ride a horse?" I said "this is the first time I've ever been on a horse" I just knew, I just felt the horse.
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.
I was always working. Maybe you weren't aware of the movies I was making, or the television I was doing, or the shows I was creating, or the books I was writing; there have been thirty. But I have always been solidly at work, running as fast as I can.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think that prog rock is the science fiction of music. Science fiction speculates on what the future might be and look like and how we'll get there, and yet there's always a central theme of humanity, or there should be. Progressive rock has the same concept of exploration into the parts of the music world that hasn't been explored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And that works for me. So that if this is it, you better take it at its right proportion. That there are serious things, but most things are temporal and ephemeral, and you should cultivate that attitude. That joy and love and all the verities are what counts. So I try not to take too many things seriously, and if I find myself caught up in the seriousness of the moment, within a period of time, I'm able to cajole myself out of it.
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.
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.'
I love technology. Matches, to light a fire is really high tech. The wheel is REALLY one of the great inventions of all time. Other than that I am an ignoramus about technology. I once looked for the 'ON' button on the computer and came to find out it was on the back. Then I thought, anyone who would put the 'on' switch on the back, where you can't find it, doesn't do any good for my psyche. The one time I did get the computer on, I couldn't turn the damn thing off!
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.
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.