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

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.

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.

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.

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

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