Quotes from Simon Reeve

I still think about him all the time. I just sobbed for an age when I found the note I wrote about his death buried in my computer.

She was adamant, and she was right, that all we can do is try to carry on. To accept. To incorporate death, grief and memory into our lives. People we love never leave us. They should never leave us.

My highs can be very high, but my lows are often still very low. I have never forgotten the feeling of the railings under my hands. The cold metal, the rush of traffic, the lorry horn. It is always within me. Always part of me. I was a slip away from tragedy. I know I am still.

As a tool for dealing with the lows I stick to my mantra. I put one foot in front of the other and take a step. I do something – anything.

In a blink of a life my brother James, mother and I lost a vital part of our tiny family. We were devastated. I felt completely bereft. And then 9/11 happened. And I had written the only book in the world about the group behind the devastating attack.

So when I popped up on the phone asking questions, people were happy to help. They felt it was their duty. Plus I think everybody wants to feel appreciated. Everyone wants to feel that their work is important, it's human nature. The main reason people answered questions from a wide-eyed, twenty-something Brit, was simply because I asked.

One of the great tragedies of the post-9/11 world is actually that the US President didn't use all of the power the crisis gave him.

My highs are possibly too high, just as my lows are probably too low. Yet I want to be affected by places and people and life and grief. That's the privilege of experiences. I want to be moved and touched and emotional. That's what makes me feel alive. That's why I adore adventures and need to travel.

Their lesson was simple: our lives are nothing without our past, without our history, without our culture, without our culture and old stones. It all matters, because it gives meaning.

In that moment, I knew I never wanted to stop travelling, and discovering. I knew that for as long as I could I needed to use each journey to enrich my mind, heart and life. I would take chances, go to strange places, and dive into the culture of the world. And I would never take it for granted.

a wonderful young honey-voiced woman called Batsola Andrianjaka, who explained why Madagascans do not fear death the way we do in the West. 'This is a country where death is more important than life,' she had told me. 'Death is the chance for a humble human to become a powerful ancestor, someone respected and consulted by the living.

You are people in a labyrinth. Just be. He needed to say nothing more. It was the essence of everything. The distillation of a thousand sacred texts and self-help manuals. Life can be a maze. Don't always look for something more. Enjoy the now. Live for the moment.

boredom is key for developing our imagination. A child who is never bored has no space to dream, or to work up a solution to their predicament, and less reason to create.

Try to drown the whispers in your head that are negative with the knowledge, with the stronger and louder certainty that you are wonderful, inspiring and interesting, both now and into your future.

People don't change when others tell them they should. People change when they tell themselves they must.

You can start locally. Upturn a glass on a map and centre it on your home. Then draw a ring around the rim and explore that circle so you know it like the back of your hand. All travel gifts memories, and spontaneity has a place.

Careful planning and preparation guarantees powerful experiences.

If pre-warned perhaps I could have used the tactic of a former KGB officer I once knew. He claimed he would swallow handfuls of lard before boozy meetings with crucial contacts, because the fat would line his stomach, prevent absorption of alcohol, and keep him sharp and focused. This is still not to be recommended.

I also try to use a technique that has worked well for me in relationships: if someone believes really strongly that we should do something, whether it's the assistant producer or the executive in charge, we generally do it. Enthusiasm trumps apathy.

I looked forwards to the flight deck. The door was open and I could see the pilot and co-pilot toasting each other with glasses of vodka. In the context of where we were going, this felt completely normal.

She was opinionated, thoughtful and funny, telling tales about a horrific shoot she abandoned when a producer started gluing stick insects to a branch in a garage in Croydon.

He charged me about £50 and in fifteen minutes I had a genuine Somali diplomatic passport, bearing my own name and photograph. No checks, no birth certificate, of course. I still have the passport, and it remains one of my strangest travel souvenirs.

A local scientist, who had taken it upon himself to rally some help from other retired experts and deactivate some of the weaponry, showed me into a corrugated-iron shed, locked by a single piece of string, inside which were 30,000 rusting shells still containing the military high-explosive TNT.

We stopped to grab something to eat in a wooden hut of a café that, at one time, had been a brothel. A wandering minstrel came in to sing us a melancholy song. He explained it was about the homeland he had lost and longed for. The emotion was heartfelt.