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.

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.

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.

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.

I always have been optimistic about humanity's future. Always. Even at the most dismaying of times.

Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes.

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