Quotes from Michael Palin

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'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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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'.

A writer's mind must never be closed. It's his duty to be curious and my duty to feed the curiosity. Think of it as the start of a big adventure.

Beryl leaves to have her verruca attended to yet again. Someone had told her that banana was good for ridding oneself of verrucas, so she'd slept with a banana in her bed feeling rather silly, before being told it was only the skin.

The ships slowly picked their way through, guided from patch to patch of open water by the shouts from the crow's nest. Tern, cape pigeon and white petrel flew around the ship. Seals on the ice were so slow to take fright that they were easily bludgeoned on the head and brought on board for food. In the stomach of one of them they found 9 lb of granite stones, which puzzled Ross, as they were a thousand miles from the nearest land.

Thursday, October 19th After breakfast, round to Ma's by 9.15. Her Telegraph bears the headline 'Palin for Prime Minister' on the arts page.

Note that patients in hospital in 1830 were prescribed eight pints of beer a day.

Eric and I try to analyse this phenomenon and decide it can only be that the Swedes have no sense of humour of their own and have to import it.

The Cleese Theory of Convenience. I think, roughly précised, it means that everyone will do only what's most convenient for them – and if you want things done your way you must not appear too agreeable or easy to please, or you will be the victim of other people's desire for convenience.

He has had more hallucinations recently. He talks about 'When that man was in the kitchen …' and so on. Recently he locked the door in the evening, in case 'those men' got in. He knows by their accents that they are quite cultured, and they are apparently friendly, but it is frightening that they should be so real to him.

Lots of traffic heading into town. One dirty, smoke-belching van makes me so angry that if I'd been alongside I think I would have had a go at the driver. I'd rather see pollution wardens than parking wardens but I suppose there's no money in pollution prevention.

My room, my books, my house, the garden, my interest in everything around me renewed by absence. This little world suddenly special, no longer commonplace … something to relish. It's a remarkable feeling and one which I count as paradoxically one of the great pleasures of travel. The almost sensuous delight in the ordinary and commonplace.

disordering the attic