Michael Palin Quotes

Manchester United was a sad experience. Things didn't go as I had hoped. I was disappointed, and it didn't help me to rise to the surface.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

I'm disappointed that I really haven't been able to race in a way that is reflective of the amount of work that I have done and how I have trained. But I don't regret giving this a go.

It is bitter to think of one's best years disappearing in this unpolished country.

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

Everything I've done in my career has been for nothing.

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure.

I was told once if I kept breaking things on my legs, that I wasn't going to be able to walk soon, you know? I wanted to be a pro skateboarder, but it was too hard. I was trying, but it wasn't going to happen.

My England captaincy was not the England captaincy I wanted, that's what will live with me for a long time.

Expectation is the mother of all frustration.

I wanted to go to Sesame Street! I remember distinctly running through my neighborhood, thinking I knew how to get to Sesame Street, and then finally finding myself among some scrub trees and realizing I don't know where to go from here. I had to just mope back home.

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

If you're alive for more than five minutes, you're going to be disappointed.

I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I'm a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?

I don't want to dream anymore, I want my life to be real!

I think that there were only two people in my high school that were comfortable there, and I think they are both pumping gas now.

I was 19 years old, pumping gas and going nowhere. I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.

But the love of adventure was in father's blood.

I'm an explorer.

It took years, honestly, to deal with the disappointment of Beijing.

I like to explore things.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.