George Takei

I do find things funny. When you see life through the eyes of someone with a good sense of humor, which my grandmother did, life is a human comedy. ”

I discovered that funny animal pictures - memes - would get a lot of likes and shares. ”

Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us. ”

Well, the whole history of Star Trek is the market demand. ”

I was pursuing my acting career, but I was silent on the LGBT issue, the issue that was closest to me. I knew if I came out then, I'd have had to change careers. ”

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past. ”

I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America's concentration camps. ”

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. ”

I'm optimistic, and I have a lot of goals. And I obey the laws of nature: I eat, exercise, and rest properly. But mostly it's about keeping the mind engaged. My grandmother lived to 104, and she had all of her faculties. I'm physically active and devout - just not as Buddhistic as she was. ”

In the United States, we have a large, broad middle that are decent, fair-minded people who are too busy to really think about issues other than their next paycheck. Those are the people that we want to get to in order to change the social climate. And Howard Stern has that audience. So I said, 'Let's boldly go where I've never been before.' ”