The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.
Spencer Tracy was a man who did very much what I do on a set, and that is, he comes down and he does his job, and then he goes back to his dressing room.
We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.
My boy, that was a TV show. I used a stunt double. I always use a stunt double. Except in love scenes. I insist on doing those myself.
Everyone knows everything about all of us. That’s too much knowledge!
What does God need with a starship?
I’m not going to have a tombstone. I’m going to be tossed in the air. Ashes, tossed like a salad.
I’m so not ready to die. It petrifies me. I go alone. I go to a place I don’t know. It might be painful. It might be the end. My thought is that it is the end. I become nameless, and I spent a lifetime being known.
Let women figure out why they won’t sleep with you. Don’t do their work for them.
Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn’t quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.
If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you’ll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.
Yeah, I do stand-up, my own type of stand-up.
The essence of paint ball is the fact that when you get hit by a ball full of paint, it hurts just enough to say, ‘Ow, I gotta get out of the way,’ but not enough to say, ‘I quit.’
It was the early 1970s and I was recently divorced. I had three kids and was totally broke. I managed to find work back east on the straw-hat circuit – summer stock – but couldn’t afford hotels, so I lived out of the back of my truck, under a hard shell.
Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene – but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.
But if you want to know the truth, the weirdest thing that has happened has been my discovery that people who attend the conventions are filled with love.
Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that ‘This is going to be terrific’ and ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done’ and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it’s good or bad.
There’s a joy and a pain about directing where the dreams you have are becoming concrete but the attention to detail, the need for time is such that it’s overwhelming at times, and the stream of responsibility.
So many dot-com companies were formulated on air.
I know very little about the viral, electronic world, but I use Twitter to communicate not only information that I think some of the fans want to hear about but also ideas.
There’s too many people in the world.