142 Quotes by Philippe Petit

Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge – and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.

I don’t have a career, I have a life. Don’t think of a career, think about your passion and look for inspiration.

I don’t like to risk my life, so I prepare sometimes for months or sometimes for years. But sometimes after a walk, I look what I have done, and I have a little bit of fear coming to me, just looking at pictures.

Improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. And since what’s impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible.

I am the poet of the high wire – I never do stunts; I do theatrical performances.

The union of altitude and solitude fills me with an arrogant sense of ownership.

I have walked many times around the world and each time it’s different from the last one. It feels a little bit like I am a theatrical director, creating a theatre in space. It’s really a theater in the sky. But of course the World Trade Center is certainly the most well-known of my productions.

There is no such thing as motivation in my world. I am not motivated to do what I do. As an artist, I am driven, I am compelled, I am thrust forward by a force so rooted inside me, so convincing, that it seems futile to try to explain it. Although it has a name: passion.

If I look at the performance of another friend Sting, whenever I hear him take over a stage and share his art with millions, it’s very inspiring to me. So I have a lot in my life, a lot of friends who inspire me and I’m sure it goes the other way around, or so that I inspire them.