People who go to the polar regions are statistically less likely to die than salesmen who drive on motorways in England.

There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing

Whenever feasible, pick your team on character, not skill. You can teach skills; you can't teach character.

There is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.

The ultimate starting point for planning any adventure or expeditionby far and away the greatest book on earth

While I was serving, I worked as an adventure training officer, teaching soldiers how to ski, canoe and climb.

Rivalry is one of the factors pushing me. While my back was turned, the Norwegians managed to achieve the first Arctic crossing in winter. I didn't want the same to happen in the Antarctic.

As a rule, anything that is pretty you avoid when on an expedition in the polar extremes. Normally anything other than white means a hazard such as a crevasse.

I go on expeditions for the same reason an estate agent sells houses - to pay the bills.

... hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.

Cutting libraries during a recession is like cutting hospitals during a plague.

I want to be remembered most as a writer - one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.

Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.

Mrs. Loontwill did what any well-prepared mother would do upon finding her unmarried daughter in the arms of a gentleman werewolf: she had very decorous, and extremely loud, hysterics.

This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.

You have an utterly sincere glance when you look around after you are shipwrecked. You weep a long time on an island when you realize what's happened to you.

Once you understand that the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are nearer the Reality, which is timeless, ever in the NOW.

Obviously this is the next frontier - once you've mastered grilling, smoking is what you're going to want to do.