My mother was a schoolteacher and very keen that I go to a city school, so although it was fairly impoverished times, I traveled every day to the Auckland Grammar School.

I found fear stimulating. Particularly after you've done something that you'd been frightened of at the time, but you carried through and did the job.

[Derek] Shackleton was a man who - it's probably arrogant to say it - but he was a little bit like me. He undertook incredible dangers and carried on over the sea and over the ice and all the rest of it. He was a remarkable man.

When you're climbing at high altitudes, life can get pretty miserable.

When I was 50 years old, I actually decided to draw up a list of half a dozen things that I really hadn't done very well, and I was going to make efforts to improve. One of them was skiing, and I really did become a very much better skier.

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

I have to admit I do get a bit depressed at times and you know I think about the good old days when I was charging ahead.