I've become quite a serious explorer: I've been to Everest three times; I'm the oldest man to reach the North Pole; and I've just been to the lost world of Venezuela.

I met Picasso when I was a kid. I turned one of his drawings down which would be worth £37 million now. My dad wouldn't talk to me for a fortnight.

The greatest danger in life is not taking chances. There are so many negative people wanting to grind you down, but you can't let them. If people say you are mad, you know you're on the right track.

Wishing kindness and compassion to all living creatures.

The misapprehension about me is that I am some loud, rampant maniac. I am actually very pensive and quiet.

There will be no funeral! Before I get too old and ill, I'll go to South America and live among the Pemon people and meditate. When the time is right, they can throw my body into the volcano.

I fed my Yak on my spare Cadbury chocolate 21,0000ft up Everest. It was a blonde, very sweet female Yak. I made it my pet after that.

In the news this week, the polls continue to slide for Gordon Brown and some people are saying he's dead and buried. But I think the opposite - I say GORDON'S ALIVE!

I'll never retire. The new millennium is the age of adventure as far as I am concerned. I'm going up a volcano and off into space.

My dream is to own a Hockney - I'm a Yorkshireman, and his vibrant colours are a good example of how the north-country people are vibrant and colourful.

In the Arctic I met some Russian sailors on a submarine and they chorused, "Gordon's alive!"

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

We could never go back to how things were on the day before 9/11, but maybe I could go back to who I was.

Some truth has no nourishment in it.

There's no liquor in the land that can stop your brain from bleedin

How strangely inaccurate it is to measure length of living by length of life! The space between your birth and death is often far from a true measure of your days of living.

I don't need to put extra pressure on myself right now. The important thing is for me to stay healthy, in practice, and just keep on the hours. You just never know when it's going to happen for you.

We will work our hardest to make sure SS501 is an Asian and Worldwide Star .

We do not do good works to get into heaven; we do good works because heaven has gotten to us.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

Doing something you enjoy at times of your own choosing and making a living from it: now tell me, is that work?