Michael Palin Quotes

#1. Michael Palin decided to give up on his considerable comedy talents to make those dreadfully tedious travel shows. Have you ever tried to watch one?

John Cleese

#2. 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.

Michael Palin

#3. 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.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#6. I feel this evening that I am too hopelessly and happily corrupted by the richness of London life to ever be right for Dorset, or vice-versa.

Michael Palin

#7. 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.

Michael Palin

#8. It's not a model if it's full-size. It's a ice-breaker!

Michael Palin

#9. When in doubt, resort to animation.

Michael Palin

#10. 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.

Michael Palin

#11. 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.

Michael Palin

#12. '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.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#14. Geography prepares for the world of work - geographers, with their skills of analysis are highly employable!

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#17. 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?

Michael Palin

#18. I cut down trees, I skip and jump, I like to press wild flowers. I put on women's clothing and hang around in bars.

Michael Palin

#19. A good day's filming at last ... John Horton's rabbit effects are superb. A really vicious white rabbit, which bites Sir Bor's head off. Much of the ground lost over the week is made up. We listen to the Cup Final in between fighting the rabbit
Liverpool beat Newcastle 3-0.

Michael Palin

#20. 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.

Michael Palin

#21. Ronnie Barker was a straightforward man who had this extraordinary ability to make the nation laugh

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#23. Now, what sort of person would write a scene where a young man stumbles upon a castle full only of beautiful young women? Answer: ME!

Michael Palin

#24. 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.

Michael Palin

#25. 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.

Michael Palin

#26. 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.

Michael Palin

#27. There are many ways of seeing the world. You can hang upside down from a meteor, volunteer to be the fourth stage of a three-stage rocket, or simply get in a balloon and keep going. But if it's sheer, unadulterated discomfort you're looking for, just stay on land.

Michael Palin

#28. 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.

Michael Palin

#29. 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.

Michael Palin

#30. 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.

Michael Palin

#31. One of the difficult things of so much travelling is to say goodbye.

Michael Palin

#32. 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.

Michael Palin

#33. 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.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#35. You can't get a suit of armour and a rubber chicken just like that. You have to plan ahead.

Michael Palin

#36. Somewhere, a long way away, people are doing sensible things like mowing lawns and digging gardens.

Michael Palin

#37. I will die, but not retire.

Michael Palin

#38. I mistrust total competence. I've always felt life is a series of small disasters we try to get through.

Michael Palin

#39. 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.

Michael Palin

#40. 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.

Michael Palin

#41. 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.

Michael Palin

#42. In the absence of fear there is little faith.

Michael Palin

#43. NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!

Michael Palin

#44. We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet.

Michael Palin

#45. You don't ask people about the immigration policies of the U.K. or their country's agricultural policy. Instead, you talk to them about the meal they're eating or their family, and from that you get the sense of another human being, someone we can all relate to.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#47. Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life

Michael Palin

#48. 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.

Michael Palin

#49. If atheists are deaf to the word of God, then theists are blind to the ways of man.

Michael Palin

#50. Night falls over Machu Picchu to the sound of Abba's 'Dancing Queen'.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#52. Travelling, and being paid for it, is just great.

Michael Palin

#53. 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.

Michael Palin

#54. My marriage has worked because I am not around much.

Michael Palin

#55. 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.

Michael Palin

#56. 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.

Michael Palin

#57. 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.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#59. George Harrison's passing was really sad, but it does make the afterlife seem much more attractive.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#61. 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.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#63. 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.

Michael Palin

#64. All I ask of food is that it doesn't harm me.

Michael Palin

#65. 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.

Michael Palin

#66. I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.

Michael Palin

#67. From my travels around the world I have seen how much damage and pollution is done by the careless disposal of waste. It is also evident that we in the West produce far more and throw away far more than the developing world, almost without thinking

Michael Palin

#68. 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.

Michael Palin

#69. Listen
strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

Michael Palin

#70. 'Nice' means nothing. Is it someone who doesn't swear and shout? I swear and shout. 'Nice' sounds ineffectual.

Michael Palin

#71. [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.

Michael Palin

#72. The Buddhist version of poverty is a situation where you have nothing to contribute.

Michael Palin

#73. 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.

Michael Palin

#74. I enjoy writing, I enjoy my house, my family and, more than anything I enjoy the feeling of seeing each day used to the full to actually produce something. The end.

Michael Palin

#75. The need to eat, sleep and dry out plays havoc with your sense of wonder.

Michael Palin

#76. 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'.

Michael Palin

#77. 12.00 midnight: whilst soaking in my bath I hear a distant shout. "I'm going to bed, but I don't necessarily have to go alo-o-ne." It's Dr Chapman in the passage. He repeats the line three times, like someone selling scrap iron and it recedes along the corridor.

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#80. 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.

Michael Palin

#81. Geography is the subject which holds the key to our future

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

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

Michael Palin

#84. 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.'

Michael Palin