Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Michael Palin, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Michael Palin quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 83 Michael Palin quotes for you to read and share.
I am certainly more interested in interviewing than being interviewed. Sometimes you find yourself attacked from the start. -- Michael Palin
It's not a model if it's full-size. It's a ice-breaker! -- Michael Palin
I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so. -- Michael Palin
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
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
In the absence of fear there is little faith. -- Michael Palin
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
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
I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought ... I thought ... maybe, one day, I could be one of them. -- Michael Palin
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
Geography is the subject which holds the key to our future -- Michael Palin
The human race should just slow down and think about what it is doing. -- Michael Palin
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
George Harrison's passing was really sad, but it does make the afterlife seem much more attractive. -- 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. -- Michael Palin
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
We read poems from the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Neil insisted on spilling wine over my carpet. -- Michael Palin
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
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
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
I would love to go to Iran. The island of Madagascar, everyone says is pretty exotic, or the wonderful Namibian desert. -- Michael Palin
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
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
Night falls over Machu Picchu to the sound of Abba's 'Dancing Queen'. -- Michael Palin
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
I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers. -- Michael Palin
My marriage has worked because I am not around much. -- Michael Palin
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
Ronnie Barker was a straightforward man who had this extraordinary ability to make the nation laugh -- Michael Palin
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
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
All I ask of food is that it doesn't harm me. -- Michael Palin
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
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
Travelling, and being paid for it, is just great. -- Michael Palin
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
I always wanted to be an explorer, but - it seemed I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person. -- Michael Palin
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
The need to eat, sleep and dry out plays havoc with your sense of wonder. -- Michael Palin
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
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
My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy. -- Michael Palin
Somewhere, a long way away, people are doing sensible things like mowing lawns and digging gardens. -- Michael Palin
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
[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
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
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
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
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
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
When in doubt, resort to animation. -- Michael Palin
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
Please don't ask which I enjoy more - acting or hosting - because I love them equally. -- Michael Palin
'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
There is barely a country in the world where you will be completely safe. -- Michael Palin
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
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
The trouble with travelling back later on is that you can never repeat the same experience. -- Michael Palin
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
'Nice' means nothing. Is it someone who doesn't swear and shout? I swear and shout. 'Nice' sounds ineffectual. -- Michael Palin
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
I want people to know there is more to Somalia than looting and piracy. -- Michael Palin
One of the most important days of my life was when I learned to ride a bicycle. -- Michael Palin
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
You can't get a suit of armour and a rubber chicken just like that. You have to plan ahead. -- Michael Palin
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
If atheists are deaf to the word of God, then theists are blind to the ways of man. -- Michael Palin
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
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
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
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
I mistrust total competence. I've always felt life is a series of small disasters we try to get through. -- Michael Palin
I can be me, and people seem quite happy with that. -- Michael Palin
I will die, but not retire. -- Michael Palin
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
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
Geography prepares for the world of work - geographers, with their skills of analysis are highly employable! -- Michael Palin
People say the most stupid things on the spur of the moment that they then have to retract. -- Michael Palin
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
One of the difficult things of so much travelling is to say goodbye. -- Michael Palin
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION!! -- Michael Palin
The Buddhist version of poverty is a situation where you have nothing to contribute. -- Michael Palin
People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe. -- Michael Palin