Quotes About Exploration

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

The climbs up the Hand of Fatima, which is 2,000 feet, and Naga Parbat, which is just over 15,000 feet, were spectacular. The Hand of Fatima and the Kaga Tondo, in Mali, is a personal favourite of mine.

Musically, I try not to box things in. I try to just play around this spectrum of influences: soul, jazz, and hip-hop.

I have always been interested in the whole spectrum of the outdoors.

Nobody can ever pin you down when you speculate.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.

Part of my attraction to ancient art is that there is an element of risk, of speculation.

I love incredibly imaginative, speculative sci-fi.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we're probably not going to see.

I read and write speculative fiction because I want to go someplace really different.

It's OK to pursue speculative ideas because we don't want to be too cozy and safe and assume that we know everything about life in the universe. However, we have to be rigorous and careful and honest and logical and scientifically meticulous when we speculate.

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

We are living in an open world. There is a freedom of speech and, clearly, freedom of speculation.

Nuclear fusion of light elements like hydrogen or helium would permit approaching the speed of light. It seems very attractive to refuel your space ships where the fuel is.

I hold the world speed record downhill, in a Rover. I think it was 17 kilometers per hour, downhill.

Today, to find a challenge is really hard. In the Alps, everything is done. The new lines, almost all of them are finished. So to find a new challenge, it's all beginning to go to speed.

I've been under the spell of the North ever since my childhood in Alaska. More and more, I've been returning to Alaska, and sometimes my adventures inspire a story.

I grew up under the spell of London. Illustrator Kerry Lee's evocative 1950 wall map of the city hung above our breakfast table at home in Canada. Over my corn flakes, I traced the capital's high roads and medieval alleys.

I look up spells for the heck of it. I haven't done any spells but I don't think that they wouldn't work.

I spend a lot of time in bed when I'm off. But if I'm feeling adventurous, I'll go to a gallery.

I love to get in the library and just spend days researching characters.

What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.