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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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, it will be clear what role I should have in life. It never happened. I never signed on the dotted line as the sort of adult my father wanted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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. And then there are people like me, who are just genuinely curious about the world.

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 of a day I've spent. When I'm filming, I'm looking quite intensely at everything I see and trying to get my own eye on what we're going through.

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 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.

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

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.

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.'

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.