Life has taught me to be very cautious of a man with a dream, especially a man who has teetered on the edge of life. It gives a fire and recklessness inside that is hard to quantify.
— Bear Grylls
For me, my training is a key part of my work as so often my life has depended on being able to move fast and haul myself up and out of something fast!
I don't thrive on stress. I love lying on the deck on our houseboat reading a book.
Accidents on big mountains happen when people's ambitions cloud their good judgment. Good climbing is about climbing with heart and with instinct, not ambition and pride.
Our fate is determined by how far we are prepared to push ourselves to stay alive - the decisions we make to survive. We must do whatever it takes to endure and make it through alive.
The SAS Reserve tends to be made up of former paratroopers and commandos who still want a challenge, but it is open to civilians.
When I'm in 'Man vs. Wild' mode, it's not pleasure. Every sensor is firing and I'm on reserve power all the time and I'm digging deep - and that's the magic of it as well, and that's raw and it's great.
Exercise helps my back. If I don't exercise, that's when it starts to hurt. The pain is a good motivator to run and exercise.
I do see a lot of the hard end of ecology, and my feeling is that we live on a super-exciting planet but a super-fragile one.
I've fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me.
Sometimes it's hard for us to believe, really believe, that God cares and wants good things for us and doesn't just want us to go off and give everything up and become missionaries in Burundi.
I was christened Edward. My sister gave me the name Bear when I was a week old and it has stuck.
And Jesus, the heart of the Christian faith is the wildest, most radical guy you'd ever come across.
The extremes of jungles, mountains, and deserts are inherently dangerous places.
Weather can kill you so fast. The first priority of survival is getting protection from the extreme weather.
My faith is an important part of my life and over the years I've learnt that it takes a proud man to say he doesn't need anything. It has been a quiet strength and a backbone through a lot of difficult times.
You're not human if you don't feel fear. But I've learnt to treat fear as an emotion that sharpens me. It's there to give me that edge for what I have to do.
I train five days a week hard - but it is short and sharp - 30 to 40 minutes of functional and pretty dynamic body-strength circuits, then I do a good yoga session on the sixth day, then I rest.
I love making healthy lean foods delicious - that's an art!
I've eaten sheep's eyes, the still hot meat from a zebra killed by a lion, and maggots which give you 70 calories to the ounce.
You can't live someone else's expectations in life. It's a recipe for disaster.
I had many opportunities to get behind products in the past, and I was always careful to evaluate all of them. I will not put my name to shoddy items.
I come from a line of self-motivated, determined folk - not grand, not high society, but no-nonsense, family-minded go-getters.
I was always brought up to have a cup of tea at halfway up a rock face.
I think it's fun running with dogs. They're always so fit and fast.
All my life the only thing I've been good at has been climbing and throwing myself off big things.
It's unresolved conflict in my life that I have a lovely family and a risky job.
My work is all about adventure and teamwork in some of the most inhospitable jungles, mountains and deserts on the planet. If you aren't able to look after yourself and each other, then people die.
I hang out all the time with kids and young scouts and I never meet kids who don't want adventure.
I always had a really natural faith as a kid. Where I knew God existed and it felt very free and pretty wild and natural, and it wasn't religious.
Survival requires us to leave our prejudices at home. It's about doing whatever it takes - and ultimately those with the biggest heart will win.
Life's full of lots of dream-stealers always telling you you need to do something more sensible. I think it doesn't matter what your dream is, just fight the dream-stealers and hold onto it.
The appeal of the wild for me is its unpredictability. You have to develop an awareness, react fast, be resourceful and come up with a plan and act on it.
Faith is personal if it's to be real.
I don't like expeditions where it is a total lottery whether you live or die. You have to keep those sort of good luck cards for rare occasions!
I'm terrified of walking into a room full of people. Sitting down at a dinner table with 15 strangers brings me out in a sweat.
It breaks my heart that my father never knew my children. He should have been around for another 25 years.
The truth is, I need 10 lifetimes to scratch the surface of the things I'd love to do.
The line between life or death is determined by what we are willing to do.
Being brave isn't the absence of fear. Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it.
To get ready to climb Everest, I did a lot of hill running with a daypack on and a lot of underwater swimming. I would swim a couple of lengths underwater and then a couple above. It gets your body going with limited oxygen.
In the British Special Air Service, combat fitness is all about running.
My faith isn't very churchy, it's a pretty personal, intimate thing and has been a huge source of strength in moments of life and death.
Christianity is not about religion. It's about faith, about being held, about being forgiven. It's about finding joy and finding home.
As a young boy, scouting gave me a confidence and camaraderie that is hard to find in modern life.
To me, adventure has always been to me the connections and bounds you create with people when you're there. And you can have that anywhere.
The special forces gave me the self-confidence to do some extraordinary things in my life. Climbing Everest then cemented my belief in myself.
Survival can be summed up in three words - never give up. That's the heart of it really. Just keep trying.
I joined the Army at 19 as a soldier and spent about four and a half years with them. Then I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident and spent a year in rehabilitation back in the U.K.
You only get one chance at life and you have to grab it boldly.
