I think all my Star Trek movies are very earthbound.

A screenplay is not a finished product; a novel is. A screenplay is a blueprint for something - for a building that will most likely never be built.

If you look at the heroes of antiquity and myth, they all have flaws. It's something that they have to overcome; their flaws are something that they have to act in spite of. The challenge is not to defy your fate, but to endure it. That is heroic.

Once you decide that you're going to have the death of Spock, then how does that affect the other people? Why is it there? I got a lot of stick from a lot of people from the very beginning about the idea of killing Spock. Somebody said, "You can't kill him." And I said, "Sure you can; the only question is whether you do it well."

I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions."

We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.