Charley Boorman Quotes

Like many men, I had never thought of testicular cancer and was lazy at getting check-ups.

My performances in auditions were so inept that I hardly got any jobs in film or TV. I just could not learn the lines and the thought of doing theatre terrified me. What if I forgot my lines in the middle of a scene with an entire audience watching?

The experience of riding an electric bike is very different. Because there was no engine noise and no big vibration coming from the bike, it wasn’t as stressful.

He was an amazing actor and could mimic anybody’s voice. My sister Katrine was walking past one day and could hear our dad shouting and thought, ‘God, I won’t go in that room!’ but realised it was Nicol Williamson mimicking my father’s voice perfectly.

If you say to people, ‘I’m off to Papa New Guinea,’ you’ll often get a bad reaction – usually from people who’ve never been there. There’s this fear of the unknown. And 99% of the time, you end up surprised – it rekindles your faith in humanity.

Ever since I’ve been seven I’ve been trying to make a living out of motorbikes.

I don’t read when I’m travelling.

My dad had no interest in motorbikes at all. It didn’t come up on his radar.

Children aren’t meant to die before their parents.

Sitting on the back of my motorbike going from west to east through Mongolia was one of the most inspiring and awesome experiences I’ve ever had. There was so little influence of the western world.

I always think that a bit sad – that people think their wives would stop them doing what they wanted to do.

I found I was being pushed to one side and I was being ear-marked as being thick, which is a very damaging thing to be told as a young kid.

I had a wonderful childhood, looking back on it.

I feel I have got away with beating cancer so I am now living life to the full and not worrying about whether it will come back.

I’d agree to a film because it sounded like it was going to be filmed in a nice place and only afterwards I would check out the story to find it was rubbish.

I appeared in several of Dad’s films – at the time, I didn’t really appreciate how great a director he was.

No-one’s ever satisfied.

I always wonder who people are when I meet them; where they live, how they get home from work and little things like that.

It took four days from discovering I had cancer to finding out how serious the problem was.

I was a child actor in ‘Deliverance,’ but not the banjo player. It was my dad’s big movie as a director, and at the very end there’s a scene where Jon Voight comes home to his wife. I played his young son.

I grew up in Wicklow, near Roundwood. It’s a beautiful place on the east coast. That’s where I started riding bikes.

Travelling is fantastic fun and you see far more of a country journeying through it.

I’m competitive but I’m not butch.

Apart from my weight, I wouldn’t change anything about the way I look: you’ve got what you’ve got – make the most of it!

GPS devices are fantastic, but when travelling, especially in the middle of Africa, you must always bring a map as well.

It’s very rare that you get that period of time to hang out with your best buddy and ride motorbikes.

When I was on the motorbike in the Dakar Rally I had a lot of time to think.

Nothing interesting ever happens on motorways or in hotels.

You need to think Gucci when you are camping – make things as luxurious as you can.

If you are going to try and convince somebody to travel, do it with a small map – the distances look like nothing on a small map.

I grew up in Ireland, in the Wicklow Mountains just behind Dublin, and got a job in a Volkswagen garage when I was 14. I did it in the summer for about five weeks. My father thought it would be a great idea because I was really into bikes.

We discovered that often it was better to sleep in a nice familiar tent than to go off and look for a hotel.

On the whole, GPS is fine but you still need maps because the information available can be different to what’s on the ground. You need to be vigilant for obstacles.

Any trip is good. Any bike trip is better!

I broke both legs, which is why I ended up lying in bed for three months. It was six months before I could walk on one leg.

At the time when I was going to school in Ireland people didn’t really have a clue about what it was, so I had to spend a lot of my time trying to explain to teachers what dyslexia meant.

Excalibur’ was a quest for my father. I remember it was manic on the film set. And we had these massive castle sets. I think my dad was under tremendous pressure making the movie because there was so much going on. I remember it was a hard one to make – a lot of stress and strain.

I’m very grateful to being dyslexic and I owe my career to being dyslexic.

The thing about Mongolia is that it’s incredibly difficult to grow vegetables there, so mostly we ate muttony stews.

When you ride electric bikes, you know the terrain that you’re riding on becomes a factor and headwinds become a factor. Then there is tailwinds, which is behind you… it makes such a difference going downhill and stuff like that.

My ideal holiday would be to spend the first week doing lots of fun stuff, then to spend the second week relaxing on a beach.

I’ve crashed a lot in the past.

I’m a traveller, I love to travel.

I had a wife and children. I was mostly working in painting and decorating and then taking the occasional acting job as they came along. At that stage in your life you have to think about your priorities. It looked like I was going to have to take the building more seriously and give up acting.

Africa can make people see things differently, and they realise the world is not as dangerous as people think.

I think obviously when you’re first diagnosed with cancer you definitely panic and that your mind races and thinks the worst but I was extremely lucky.

I don’t have to win at tennis. I have a friend who is so competitive at tennis I sometimes throw a game because I know it means so much to him.

Sometimes you take for granted what you have on your own doorstep.

I got that sense of travel and adventure from my father.

You need to channel your inner dog: know when you need food and when you need rest. And if you get stressed, know when you need to go walkies.

Get on to social media and ask questions about the areas you’re going to. You’ll be surprised at the amount of responses from people who want you to experience some of the amazing things they discovered themselves.

Ewan McGregor and I ate a lot of strange things on our motorcycle journey around the world, but the strangest had to be a meal we had in Mongolia.

I have a reading problem and it’s hard for me to read books. But I had no problem with the ‘Emerald Forest’ script.

I mean, if the country’s in the middle of a war of something, I probably wouldn’t go.

Mongolia was unbelievable. Great parts of it are completely untouched by modern development, but the roads, when you could even call them that, were terrible and we’d find ourselves on the wrong route without any warning.