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1 " Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff. "
― Richard Hammond , Or Is That Just Me?
2 " All of us, each and every one, lives a life that is, in its own right, an epic. "
― Richard Hammond , On the Edge
3 " If he was paralyzed, we'd have to put in ramps and have things altered for wheelchair access; you can get kitchens refitted; bathrooms altered ... I'd get him a really fast wheelchair. It'd be OK. If he couldn't talk, I'd get him a great computer. Anything can be dealt with, everything can be overcome. Just be alive. Just, please God, I beg you, please, please keep him alive for me. "
4 " He wrote to tell him not to be scared that he had injured his brain, because he had done the same thing and got better. It was a source of comfort beyond words. "
5 " And to Mindy, I can only ever say a simple thank you. And dedicate the rest of my life to her. "
6 " Once the switch of parenthood is thrown, it changes you for ever & you can never escape the extra pull of humanity it gives you." - Richard Hammond "
7 " As it turns out, skiing trips are pretty bloody annoying anyway. It’s mostly about queuing, skiing. You queue to get your breakfast in the stupid wooden hotel, you queue to get on the minibus or find a taxi to take you to the stupid skiing place at the bottom of the stupid hill. You queue to buy a pass, which you lose later in the day and then you get down to the serious queuing, at the point where you get on the lift at the bottom of the mountain to take you to the top. This, technically, isn’t queuing, it’s something more akin to fighting, so I preferred this bit. You hang around in a big crowd on a sort of train platform. Except there are no tracks, just a big wire overhead. Eventually, the cable car device lumbers into view and disgorges a load of really annoying people with stupid smiles under their stupid hats on to the other side of the platform. The car never stops; it just swings around the bottom of the platform on a huge, horizontal wheel until it comes up the side on which you and several million Germans are loitering, ready to get on board. Then there is a really massive fight, lots of shouting, some vicious pushing and, the next thing you know, you’re on the cable car, face pressed to the frosted glass, staring through it at crying kids back on the platform, disappointed mothers and bereft lovers waving mournfully as the other half of their life is transported away on the carriage that someone, usually you, prevented them from getting on by elbowing them in the face and jabbing a ski pole into their groin. It’s really rather good fun. But only that part is fun; the rest of it is terrible. "
― Richard Hammond , As You Do: Adventures with Evel, Oliver, and the Vice-President of Botswana
8 " The home was familiar. But I was a stranger. There was a huge distance between me and this life that I had led. Everything was the same, yes - everything except me. The sameness in the things around me just served to illuminate the strangeness in me. "
9 " Once the switch of parenthood is thrown, it chages you for ever & you can never exchange the extra pull of humanity it gives you. "
