The human race should just slow down and think about what it is doing.

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...

I’ve never had a particular skill. I can’t cook, dance, play an instrument, speak a foreign language. This used to worry me. I’d think, when I’m grown up, at 18, then I made it 21,...

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...

[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...

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought… I thought… maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

I can be me, and people seem quite happy with that.

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...

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 –...

I am very cautious of people who are absolutely right, especially when they are vehemently so.

One of the most important days of my life was when I learned to ride a bicycle.

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.

I want people to know there is more to Somalia than looting and piracy.

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...

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.

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

Travelling, and being paid for it, is just great.

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....

People say the most stupid things on the spur of the moment that they then have to retract.

People are still crazy about Python after twenty-five years, which I find hard to believe.

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.

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?

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...

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.

There is nothing better than playing a scene with John Cleese or Maggie Smith. It’s electric. But I don’t think I’m the sort of person who needs to have an outer ego in order to...

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.

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’.

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

I would love to go to Iran. The island of Madagascar, everyone says is pretty exotic, or the wonderful Namibian desert.

My parents have been married forty-two years. I wonder how many of those were happy.

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.

I always wanted to be an explorer, but – it seemed I was doomed to be nothing more than a very silly person.

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.

I am restless. I don’t mind leaving this comfortable, static life. I could live a year on my own in a remote village.

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.

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.

People look for patterns in everything. It’s what keeps us sane, I suppose. I struggle to see any patterns in my life. I think I can understand depression a bit because of my sister. My...

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...

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.

I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers.

Please don’t ask which I enjoy more – acting or hosting – because I love them equally.

As I work in the afternoon on committing to paper some of my morning’s thoughts, I find myself just about to close on the knotty question of whether or not I believe in God. In...

When I’m travelling, I always take my little notebook and scribble things down as I watch them; I’m very much geared to everything that’s happening. Whereas, the diary I keep is just about a record...

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,...

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 will die, but not retire.

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.

It was a strange feeling going into a church I did not know for a service that I did not really believe in, but once inside I couldn’t help a feeling of warmth and security....

‘Nice’ means nothing. Is it someone who doesn’t swear and shout? I swear and shout. ‘Nice’ sounds ineffectual.

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.