Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.
People talk about doom-laden scenarios happening in the future: they are happening in Africa now. You can see it perfectly clearly. Periodic famines are due to too many people living on land that can't sustain them.
We are not overpopulated in an absolute sense; we've got the technology for 10 billion, probably 15 billion people, to live on this planet and live good lives. What we haven't done is developed our technology.
If you watch animals objectively for any length of time, you're driven to the conclusion that their main aim in life is to pass on their genes to the next generation.
I think we're lucky to be living when we are, because things are going to get worse.
You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.
I'm swanning round the world looking at the most fabulously interesting things. Such good fortune.
It is vital that there is a narrator figure whom people believe. That's why I never do commercials. If I started saying that margarine was the same as motherhood, people would think I was a liar.
Well, I'm having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.
What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.
Natural history is not about producing fables.
I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn 'til dusk, unless it's a pigeon, which isn't really wild, which might come and settle near them.
I suffer much less than many of my colleagues. I am perfectly able to go to Australia and film within three hours of arrival.
We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that's what's happening. Too many people there. They can't support themselves - and it's not an inhuman thing to say. It's the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a coordinated view about the planet it's going to get worse and worse.
I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.
Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.
I'm absolutely strict about it. When I land, I put my watch right, and I don't care what I feel like, I will go to bed at half past eleven. If that means going to bed early or late, that's what I live by. As soon as you get there, live by that time.
I am an ardent recycler. I would like to think that it works. I don't know whether it does or not.
You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.
I don't approve of sunbathing, and it's bad for you.
