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.

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

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

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.

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.

I know it feels like two steps forward and one step back, but we are making progress. In my lifetime, I have lived through one World War, I have lived through the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the pulling down of the Berlin Wall. I have experienced what I never thought I would have experienced, which is a pretty workable peace in Northern Ireland, and I experienced a unified Europe - until the Conservative government got its hands on the idea that in order to appease a few back-benchers they would hold a referendum, what a disastrous idea.

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.