“Until I started taking my antidepressants, though, I didn’t actually know that I was depressed. I thought the dark staticky corners were part of who I was. It was the same way I felt before I put on my first pair of glasses at age 14 and suddenly realized that trees weren’t green blobs but intricate filigrees of thousands of individual leaves; I hadn’t known, before, that I couldn’t see the leaves, because I didn’t realize that seeing leaves was a possibility at all. And it wasn’t until I started using tools to counterbalance my depression that I even realized there was depression there to need counterbalancing. I had no idea that not everyone felt the gravitational pull of nothingness, the ongoing, slow-as-molasses feeling of melting down into a lump of clay. I had no way of knowing that what I thought were just my ingrained bad habits — not being able to deposit checks on time, not replying to totally pleasant emails for long enough that friendships were ruined, having silent meltdowns over getting dressed in the morning, even not going to the bathroom despite really, really, really having to pee — weren’t actually my habits at all. They were the habits of depression, which whoa, holy shit, it turns out I had a raging case of.”

“

Regarding his [angry] reaction to [Bashir’s genetic enhancement storyline]:

Jordan Hoffman: What did the other cast members think? Were they on your side or did they think you were being crazy?

Alexander Siddig: I had a reputation for being a bit of a crank, yeah. They thought I was being cranky. I had this – there was one time I got furious because none of us were being paid royalties on our - this is rubbish, not important for the real world - but, nevertheless, we weren’t being paid royalties on our photographs. So I changed my name for a number of reasons, but that was one of them. So that they would have to re-do all the photographs, all the press with all the right name on it.

And I didn’t turn up to the big photo call for the season’s photo. So there’s one season’s photo of Deep Space Nine – the cast, without me in it which is the one I didn’t turn up to. And being a naïve twenty-something year-old, I didn’t realize that they immediately turned around and fired the head of marketing. So there was a real significant impact for me being such a childish brat.

”