My mother really was the strength in our family. She would sort of keep us in line and I admired her very much .

I still had the same affection for New Zealand as I've always had. Didn't change at all.

I was certainly seriously emotionally affected [ when Louise Hillary and Belinda Hillary died], but we were building the hospital at the time and I decided that the only thing to do was to carry on and complete the hospital - and it was a jolly good hospital too, I might say. So I really did it by working and working on the things that Louise and I had been working on.

I get older I get more cantankerous, but June [Hillary] gets a bit more cantankerous, too.

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.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a yeti.

I was incredibly stubborn. I mean, I believe that my father was frequently in the right, but I would never admit it, and so we did have a few set-tos on various topics; but on the whole as I got older and my father got more mature we got along reasonably well.