Quotes About Adventure

A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing.

I started deliberately looking for characters, ideally outsiders and ideally Americans. So I just started reading widely, as I tell my students to do: read voraciously and promiscuously.

I've been lucky enough to travel widely. When you're based in Europe, it's very easy to go to Madrid or Budapest for the weekend. I also lived in Italy for ten years and now live in Ireland.

I read a lot of highly unsuitable books for an 11-year-old. I was desperate to read as widely as possible. I thought, 'There are so many places I am never going to get the chance to visit, but I can if I read them.' And I did. I could go anywhere in the world - and off it - by reading.

I write about all manner of things: a guy fighting aliens in the New York State Library, Antarctica, Inca civilization in Peru, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and people often ask me, where do I get these ideas from? They come from reading widely, watching a lot of documentaries, and increasingly ,as I was able to, travelling around the world.

There's a certain road in life most people walk on, because it's familiar, and they can jostle to get in front place. I prefer to take a different road that's less crowded, with many forks, where you get a wider view of life. I call it 'the road less travelled'. That's where I want to be.

I first visited Buenos Aires at the end of 2015 while filming the latest series of 'Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways', and I liked it so much I've been back twice with my wife. It's so much nicer than I expected - like a warmer, bigger, wider version of Paris.

I don't necessarily want a higher education, I want a wider education. I want to know everything and experience everything.

My passion outside of music is that I am a total gear head. My wife and I own six vehicles, three of which are off-road.

I've been snowboarding my whole life. My wife's really good, and I just try to keep up with her.

My wife made me a book of photographs she took of our road trip across the United States. Makes for a good coffee table book.

I met my wife, Jennifer, while sitting next to her on the airplane on the way to England. I was heading to Oxford as a Marshall scholar.

Moving around a lot allows you to experience many different cultures and learn about the ways that different people in different parts of the country live, and it probably made me somewhat more adventuresome and allowed me to meet my future wife in Pensacola.

I used to play football, and then my wife bought me a fishing rod.

My mother hoped I would meet a nice doctor or barrister or accountant who would marry me and take me to live in what is now called Fashionable Dublin Four. But she felt that this was a vain hope. I was a bit loud to make a nice professional wife, and anyway, I was too keen on spending my holidays in far flung places to meet any of these people.

I convinced my wife to let me climb Everest. I emptied my savings and took out a loan so I could afford to make the trip. I wanted to do it solo and I pushed myself too hard. I was carrying too much gear and got altitude sickness. I meditated to the point where I was feeling better, but didn't make it up, because I got involved with a rescue.

I do stupid stuff like that: I'll call my wife from the road, send her pictures of glaciers.

I often think that the last holiday is the greatest, but then some really stand out in my mind. One of the best was one my wife and I had in the Lake District. We stayed in a B&B and walked around the countryside for two weeks.

So long as I can stay mentally alert - inquiring, curious - I want to keep going. I love my wife and my children, but I don't want to sit around at home with them. We go on safaris and things like that. I can do that for a couple of weeks a year. I'm just not ready to stop, to die.

My wife is amazing. She had to know she was getting into a heap of trouble when we met.

I've traveled the world and been about everywhere you can imagine. There's not anything I'm scared of except my wife.

I learned to be a hot-air balloon pilot to take tourists over the Masai Mara Reserve in order to earn some money and finance the work I was doing with my wife, Anne. We were studying the life of a family of lions for more than two years. Taking pictures was a way to capture information we could not put in words.

In the spring of 2012, I moved to the San Francisco bay area with my wife and two young sons.

If it's not a film in which Harrison Ford's wife is being kidnapped, I'm not interested; he's my hero.