Top 44 Michael Palin Quotes

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.

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 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.

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 satisfied.

‘The Truth’ is not meant to preach or point any fingers. It’s meant to show that perhaps we should all avoid taking the moral high ground unless we have thought about things a bit more.

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.

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.

Please don’t ask which I enjoy more – acting or hosting – because I love them equally.

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

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.

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

There is barely a country in the world where you will be completely safe.

There are people who travel because they want to push themselves to physical limits, people who walk across deserts or cycle across the Antarctic – like Ranulph Fiennes, who just does it because it’s there. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world.

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.

People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe.

The kids growing up is a separate strand to your life. However bad a day you’ve had, that’s the most important thing, and you have to remember that.

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.

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

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’.

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 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’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 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.

So many people had been asking me to write an autobiography, or threatening to write my biography without any input from me, that I thought I’d better tell my story before other people told it for me.

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.

The human race should just slow down and think about what it is doing.

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

One of the most important days of my life was when I learned to ride a bicycle.

People say the most stupid things on the spur of the moment that they then have to retract.

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

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

I want people to know there is more to Somalia than looting and piracy.

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.

When I read profiles of myself, I sometimes think: ‘I have spent my whole life struggling to understand my motivations and impulses, and I’ve never quite sorted them out.’

The trouble with travelling back later on is that you can never repeat the same experience.

There is nothing better than playing a scene with John Cleese or Maggie Smith. It’s electric. But I don’t think I’m the sort of person who needs to have an outer ego in order to produce something. I realised that through the travel programmes.

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.

I would love to go to Iran. The island of Madagascar, everyone says is pretty exotic, or the wonderful Namibian desert.

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.

‘Nice’ means nothing. Is it someone who doesn’t swear and shout? I swear and shout. ‘Nice’ sounds ineffectual.

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.