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When you are on a climb, you always pick out people's words of encouragement, and it can push us on, without doubt.

In most sports, your brain and your body will cooperate... But in rock climbing, it is the other way around. Your brain doesn't see the point in climbing upwards. Your brain will tell you to keep as low as possible, to cling to the wall and not get any higher. You have to have your brain persuading your body to do the right movements.

You learn over years of expeditions that having faith, and putting one foot in front of the other, you do end up pulling off climbs that seem completely impossible. There's a certain beauty to that. It has an allure.

I feel like I'm climbing as well, if not better, than ever.

Identifying and overcoming natural fear is one of the pleasing struggles intrinsic to climbing.

There's a constant tension in climbing, and really all exploration, between pushing yourself into the unknown but trying not to push too far. The best any of us can do is to tread that line carefully.

To me, climbing is like eating or drinking. I have to do it; it's part of my life.

Like solo sailors venturing into the Southern Ocean, climbers are seduced by risk. The desire to push to a summit or scale a rock face is so strong that they consciously or subconsciously minimize safety precautions drilled into their brains.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

Climbing is what I do.