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.

I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.

I made a promise to myself that I would try to introduce something unexpected in every single episode of the series. It was largely to amuse myself as much as anything. I didn't ever want the audience to feel that they knew everything.

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.

The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.

I've been an activist all my life. And always a liberal activist, for the simple reason that it is on the liberal left that you find the true recognition for the need for fairness in society. I'm not saying equality, because that you can never achieve, because equality is based on such complex criteria. But fairness is another issue.