About Michael Palin: Michael Edward Palin is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter. He was one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and later made a number of travel documentaries.
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.
I always wanted to be an explorer, but - it seemed I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person.
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 can be me, and people seem quite happy with that.
The human race should just slow down and think about what it is doing.
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 ...
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...
I was very bad at projecting my voice. I used to do this Gumby Flower Arranging sketch which involved shouting, and I could never do it right, and at one point my voice went completely.
I am certainly more interested in interviewing than being interviewed. Sometimes you find yourself attacked from the start.
I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.
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?
When I'm travelling, I always take my little notebook and scribble things down as I watch them; I'm very much geared to everything that's happening. Whereas, the diary I keep is just about a record of a day I've spent. When I'm filming, I'm looking q...
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'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.
Something about John Cleese was always very unsettled, I felt. There was always something else he wanted to do. He seemed constantly driven by this sense that there was a nirvana somewhere; some unique place where mind, body and soul would be utterly...
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 will die, but not retire.
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.
There is barely a country in the world where you will be completely safe.
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.
People say the most stupid things on the spur of the moment that they then have to retract.
