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I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.

I don't really know much about pirates, or pirate culture. I'd be a contrarian pirate.

I think that pirates represent every person's ability to get up and leave their current daily situation and go on an adventure, and maybe to see things and do things they've never done before or even dreamed of doing.

I'm not a pirate. I'm an innovator.

I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning. Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it.

I always say, 'I'm not a pirate, I just play one on TV.'

Once you discover that real pirates are more interesting than fictional ones, you can't look away.

The more I learned about real pirates, the more exciting they seemed to me. They appeared to be even more dramatic than pirates of the movies or TV shows.

Real pirates were better than in movies, more daring and terrifying and cunning than any screenwriter could imagine. They operated during the Golden Age of Piracy, from 1650 to 1720.

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.