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All Quotes by author - Michael Palin

" Armageddon is not around the corner. This is only what the people of violence want us to believe. The complexity and diversity of the world is the hope for the future. "

" Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people. "

" Despite having seen a fair amount of the world, I still love travelling - I just have an insatiable curiosity and like looking out of a window. "

" Fame changes everything. When you're well-known, you're expected to be different. Some people assume you must have a yacht and four homes. Or that you're famous because you are 'A Decent Man'. "

" Hollywood was possible for a while! Why didn't I go along with it? Well, the other things that were pulling me back were more important. Being at home, being in the same marriage, these things enabled me to go off and travel in the first place. "

" I always wanted to be an explorer, but - it seemed I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person. "

" I am certainly more interested in interviewing than being interviewed. Sometimes you find yourself attacked from the start. "

" I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller. "

" I am restless. I don't mind leaving this comfortable, static life. I could live a year on my own in a remote village. "

" I can be me, and people seem quite happy with that. "

" I'd got over playing a character. People accepted who I was, and if I was incompetent and useless, they felt quite endeared to me. "

" I do have high standards. I look at everything I have done and think, 'Why wasn't that better?' Part of my motivation is from crippling self-doubt - I have got to prove myself wrong. "

" I don't seek discomfort. But, very often, you realise that what you fear is actually quite ephemeral; something's different, something's unfamiliar; therefore, it must be worse. "

" I don't see why it should be remarkable that you can acquire a reputation for fairness and decency. Those are qualities shared by so many people. And the great majority of people I meet are decent people, just trying to navigate their way through the world without causing too much trouble. "

" If you had a successful TV show, people wanted to see you live. Promoters had had practice with pop groups, and 'Python' achieved a similar status. We also had lots of rock star fans - George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Robert Plant. Promoters saw that and liked it. "

" I got my first lifetime achievement award years ago, and I was very excited, but then I got a sense of: Well, can one get a second lifetime award? "

" I have been unusually blessed in that I've been allowed to pursue two strands of a career that both delight me and seem to please the public. "

" I know that we shall meet problems along the way, but I'd far rather see for myself what's going on in the world outside, than rely on newspapers, television, politicians and religious leaders to tell me what I should be thinking. "

" I love reading other people's diaries, especially someone like Virginia Woolf's - such a formidable woman that it's a revelation when she shows you a more vulnerable side of herself. "

" I'm not good at confrontation. I know my strengths. I like company. And I am not a great arguer... I do find it much easier talking to people I like about things we both like. "

" I'm not your expert on Africa or animals or whatever. I'm not a travel writer or maker of documentaries. I was someone who doesn't know very much, trying to communicate. "

" I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them. "

" I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers. "

" I think you learn a lot about a country from its art. To me, it's part of the drama of life. It teaches you that there are places, moments and incidents in other cultures that genuinely have a life of their own. "

" I've always been blessed, or cursed, some might say, with an insatiable curiosity, a desire to find something out about a people and a place. That's where it all begins. "

" I've been lucky enough to stand on both poles, but the place that seemed the remotest to me was Butugychag, a former gulag in Siberia. It is completely cut off from the rest of the world. "

" I've been lucky to have made a number of travel programmes with the BBC, the object being to see places off the beaten track. As a result, I've often had a guide who's been able to show me things that you wouldn't see with a tour group. "

" I've never had a particular skill. I can't cook, dance, play an instrument, speak a foreign language. This used to worry me. I'd think, when I'm grown up, at 18, then I made it 21, it will be clear what role I should have in life. It never happened. I never signed on the dotted line as the sort of adult my father wanted. "

" I've never particularly liked travelling with large groups or being told where to go by somebody else. I prefer to find out for myself. "

" I wanted to be an explorer, but gradually found the world had been explored and that there was nowhere left, really. Once they climbed Everest in 1953, when I was 10 years old, I thought, 'Well, that's pretty much it now.' But the idea of travelling and exploring and adventure was very strong. "

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