I was selected to be an astronaut on a military program called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory back in '67 and that program got cancelled in '69 and NASA ended up taking half of us...

Looking down at the Earth, you started to pick up a sense of speed much more than I had noticed on orbit.

We were only on orbit a little over two days so we had no adverse effects from being weightless...

You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half.

We were on the dark side of the Earth when we started to see outside the window this soft pink glow, which is a lot of little angry ions out there going very fast. We were hitting them very fast.

The nature of the shuttle was, we couldn't put a crew escape system in it.

Having the opportunity to fly the first flight of something like a space shuttle was the ultimate test flight.

Living inside the shuttle was a little like camping out. We ended up sleeping in our seats. You had to pay attention to housekeeping, not get things too dirty.

The real pleasure was having the chance to enjoy being weightless, and the other was to... spend some time looking out at this beautiful spaceship Earth that we're all lucky to inhabit.

When you work really hard for something for a long time it's almost impossible to believe that it's coming true.

Selection of crews is always been somewhat of a mystery.

Love is the gateway to cosmic energy and wisdom.

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

There's no harmony in most people in a way, and I'm attracted to it, and I think it makes for good storytelling.

The life of an action star is very short. I want to be an actor like Robert De Niro , like Dustin Hoffman or Clint Eastwood who in their 70s or 80s can still act.

I contend that the problem with transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence

I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.

The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the experts, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all possibilities.

I had gotten one of the first Korg synthesizers with 300 presets.

I've got a room at the top of the world tonight. I can see everything tonight.