Michael Palin Quotes

The Cleese Theory of Convenience. I think, roughly précised, it means that everyone will do only what’s most convenient for them – and if you want things done your way you must not appear too agreeable or easy to please, or you will be the victim of other people’s desire for convenience.

I have never experienced anything quite like this in my life, and I have the distinct feeling that there is worse to come.

Of all the euphemisms for drunkenness, I think ‘disordering the attic’ one of the most poetic.

Unfortunately the interview she had lined up with a homeless girl cannot now be done, as the girl killed herself yesterday. She was the third suicide in a week at this hostel. Apparently when one goes, there is often a ‘domino’ effect.

The world makes sense this Sunday morning.

Rae was an explorer in the mould of Amundsen and Nansen, listening to the locals, learning from them what to wear, what to eat and how to survive. In his lifetime he mapped 1,750 miles of unexplored territory, with the loss of only one man. What a contrast with the disastrous expedition whose fate he was the first to discover.

My room, my books, my house, the garden, my interest in everything around me renewed by absence. This little world suddenly special, no longer commonplace … something to relish. It’s a remarkable feeling and one which I count as paradoxically one of the great pleasures of travel. The almost sensuous delight in the ordinary and commonplace.

Note that patients in hospital in 1830 were prescribed eight pints of beer a day.

A thought struck me as I left – the bags in which you are given food at McDonald’s are almost identical in texture, shape and size with the vomit bags tucked in the seat pockets of aircraft.

I mumble something, Terry J bravely launches into a school reminiscence. TG, with consummate timing, kicks over the urn with Graham’s ashes in. From then on, we’re invincible.

George Martin makes a paternal appearance. (I don’t have the cheek to ask him if he’d seen himself described in a magazine article recently as ‘the Michael Palin of rock’!) He says the studio conversion cost about £15 million. ‘Half the money was Japanese, so I feel I’d done my bit to pay them back for the Burma Railway,’ he says, elegantly.

Christopher said to himself that only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

The bird life, was, as ever, of great interest to ship’s surgeon McCormick. On seeing hovering over the ship what he believed to be a new species of Lestris, or Arctic Yager, described by Audubon, the great American bird illustrator, as an ‘indefatigable teaser of the smaller gulls’, he took a pot-shot at it. His shot failed to despatch the bird cleanly and, after descending near the deck, it recovered and flew away with one leg broken. McCormick, unusually, felt compelled to justify himself: ‘For notwithstanding that my duties as ornithologist compel me to take the lives of these most beautiful and interesting creatures . . . I never do so without a sharp sting of pain and qualm of conscience, so fond am I of all the feathered race.’ So fond, indeed, that on the same night he recorded that ‘Between midnight and one a.m. I succeeded in adding two more of the elegant white petrel to my collection, one falling dead on the quarter-deck and the other on the gun-room skylight . . . a third I shot . . . fell overboard into the sea.

He has had more hallucinations recently. He talks about ‘When that man was in the kitchen …’ and so on. Recently he locked the door in the evening, in case ‘those men’ got in. He knows by their accents that they are quite cultured, and they are apparently friendly, but it is frightening that they should be so real to him.

The first taste of the real joys of filming. As Eric puts it in his letter from France which arrived today … ‘Up early to be carried around by talkative drivers to wrong locations in time to get into the wrong costume and be ready to wait for five or six hours for a couple of seconds’ appearance on celluloid.’ It’s not as much fun as that yet.