Thirty-three great quotes from actor Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard in the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies and television series.
During the course of the seven years I played scenes with an oil slick, I played a scene with a grain of rice. Sometimes with indescribable creatures. I remember having a conversation with something which was simply a smell, that’s all. It was part of our job. ~Patrick Stewart
I know this is a lottery, this business of ours. ~Patrick Stewart
I am not the archetypal leading man. This is mainly for one reason: as you may have noticed, I have no hair. ~Patrick Stewart
I’ve met actors where you think, if only you could just clean up your act and get it together, people would want to work with you. Some people are so difficult, it’s just not worth working with them. ~Patrick Stewart
A lot of these changes we do on stage. So the Apollo audience, whether it’s to their taste or not, will have to tolerate the sight of Josh and myself taking our clothes on and off. ~Patrick Stewart
It was a long time before any of us realised that we were very slowly becoming well known as actors. That was a very, very slow process, largely brought about by the fact that we were too busy working to lift up our heads and pay attention to what was happening. ~Patrick Stewart
I always loved saying, space time condominium… Space time continuum, yes sorry. Well you see the problems that are raised when you have to deal with this kind of dialogue. ~Patrick Stewart
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. ~Patrick Stewart
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. ~Patrick Stewart
So far as education is concerned, it has had a significant impact on a lot of young people who turn to science as a much more exciting and interesting study than they otherwise might have found, entirely as a result of becoming involved with Star Trek. ~Patrick Stewart
Before long there was another series, Deep Space Nine, then Voyager, now there is Enterprise. Bill was still filling Captain Kirk’s shoes, and I was building shoes of my own. ~Patrick Stewart
When I’m meant to be standing in the wings, the only way to go is the ladies’ toilets. It’s the only time I’ve ever acted in the toilets. ~Patrick Stewart
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. ~Patrick Stewart
Bill 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. ~Patrick Stewart
It still frightens me a little bit to think that so much of my life was totally devoted to Star Trek and almost nothing else. ~Patrick Stewart
We were well into our second season before all of us got that look in our eyes that maybe the predictions had been wrong and that it wasn’t going to end after two years or three. The fact that it was to go on for seven-if I had known that I would never have been part of it in the first place. ~Patrick Stewart
The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they’re renegotiating contracts. ~Patrick Stewart
My character has been in the theatre, as the title A Life in the Theatre suggests, all his life. ~Patrick Stewart
We’ve heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students. ~Patrick Stewart
I was just excited by the whole prospect of working in a television series in Hollywood. I had never anticipated that as an actor I would ever end up here. It may be some sort of fantasy I’d thought about from time to time, but it was completely unrealistic. ~Patrick Stewart
I wasn’t campaigning for a role in a Hollywood television series, it was a fluke. So you’ve got to have a measure of good luck, you really have, being in the right place at the right time. ~Patrick Stewart
Encouraging people to believe in it was the most important thing of all. It’s one of the reasons I was always uncomfortable whenever film crews came on the set to shoot things. I didn’t want our make-believe to be exposed. ~Patrick Stewart
I got into trouble once with the studio for walking off a set when I think it was Good Morning America was going to shoot their segment from our sets and I had been very reluctant to participate in this. I didn’t want to have newsreaders sitting around on our sets. ~Patrick Stewart
Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain’s ready room died it was always a sad moment. ~Patrick Stewart
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. ~Patrick Stewart
As time went on, I did campaign to lighten the character a little bit, to introduce some romance into the episodes, outside activities, horse riding and fencing and mountaineering. ~Patrick Stewart
We had some very distinguished fans: I know one chancellor of a major university who used to schedule his meetings around Star Trek. We were thrilled to discover that Frank Sinatra was a big fan. ~Patrick Stewart
For seven years I did very little theatre, and I have to make up some time. ~Patrick Stewart
During my time we had two chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, at different times of course, on the bridge, both of whom asked my permission to sit on the captain’s chair. ~Patrick Stewart
Somebody asked me what it felt like to be stepping into Captain Kirk’s shoes, but as I pointed out he was filling those shoes very satisfactorily still, because they made two feature films during the time that we were shooting the series. So the life of the original Star Trek was continuing. ~Patrick Stewart
I wouldn’t know a space-time continuum or warp core breach if they got into bed with me. ~Patrick Stewart
Tom Hanks knows the name of all the episodes. ~Patrick Stewart
Where can I go that would give me the same level of satisfaction as an actor? ~Patrick Stewart
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