Michael Palin Quotes

The only acting I knew when I was a boy came from Lochgelly. With a double bill, people would live their lives in the cinema. You would even see babies being breastfed in the audience.

As a kid, I grew up watching movies in the cinema, so that dream and charm will never die.

I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.

Growing up I used to ... one of my heroes growing up was President John F. Kennedy. And I actually have a memory box from when I was a little where I saved articles about President Kennedy. He was a real hero.

I love it here in Boston and I love studying medicine. But it’s not home. Dublin is home. Being back with you felt like home. I miss my best friend. I’ve met some great guys here, but I didn’t grow up with any of them playing cops and robbers in my back garden. I don’t feel like they are real friends. I haven’t kicked them in the shins, stayed up all night on Santa watch with them, hung from trees pretending to be monkeys, played hotel, or laughed my heart out as their stomachs were pumped. It’s kind of hard to beat that.

I come from way north. We'd listen to radio shows all the time. I think I was the last generation, or pretty close to the last one, that grew up without TV.

I have a lot of stories about being a kid because it was the last time I was interesting.

As soon as we finished filming, I felt like I had been woken up from a magical dream and had to pinch myself to remember that it was real. Every scene is now a blur. I feel like I will be watching it for the first time with the rest of the world. I am nervous. But excited.

We used to all come outside when the streetlights came on and prowl the neighborhood in a pack, a herd of kids on banana-seat bikes and minibikes. The grown-ups looked so silly framed in their living-room and kitchen windows. They complained about their days and signed deep sighs of depression and loss. They talked about how spoiled and lucky children were these days. We will never be that way, we said, we will never say those things.

That was pretty cool [Life With Mikey]. Michael J. Fox at the time was huge. I was like, "Whoa, he's a real bona fide movie star!" I was a kid. It was a huge deal. That's kind of it. We shot it in Toronto, and a little bit in New York.

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.'

Like my mother said, you can't go back to holding hands

That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn't want any of those things. I didn't want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real.

Growing up at my grandmother's table, she always had rice. She might do something as exotic as potatoes or spaghetti, but there was still always rice, just in case you needed a little rice fix.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

Since I was a kid, every Thanksgiving growing up in New York, we always watched 'The March of the Wooden Soldiers' by Laurel and Hardy. Never miss it.

When we were kids, we would never open the minibar. A $6 Snickers bar? But the other day I was in a hotel and I was staring at a Snickers bar, and I finally just ate it. Then it was like something in me snapped. I opened all these drinks. I thought: I can do it now. Now I'm all grown-up. I can eat things from the minibar.

I thought I started acting at 5 or 6, it was really when they were interviewing real families for a toothpaste commercial. They interviewed our family.

I was a big Superman fan, growing up. I've always been a big superhero fan.

I grew up I guess you'd say in the cassette era.

I was homeschooled growing up, and we fantasized about high school, about what that experience was going to be like.

People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.

I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father's waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.