Michael Palin Quotes - Page 3

Once the travel bug bites, there is no known antidote.

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

It's not a model if it's full-scale, Tomkinson, it's an icebreaker.

I remember queuing around the block in Sheffield when I was growing up. At that time, going to the cinema was really something special - there was something about the style of the real thing that is immeasurable nicer than multiplexes.

[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all.

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

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

My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.

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 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 quite intensely at everything I see and trying to get my own eye on what we're going through.

If I am seen as successful, it's all the more reason not to change - not to lose track of friends, not to be driven everywhere, not to go and get away from the world. That, to me, is real success: enjoying what you do, but being the same person.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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