Philippe Petit

I was born in a world of opera, theatre, films, poetry, art, and therefore, out of the wire, I made a stage. That's why they call me a high wire artist.

On a very long and very high wire, I will not hope to not be blown off by high winds. I will have the certitude that such could not happen.

Many people use the words 'death defying' or 'death wishing' when they talk about wire-walking. Many people have asked me: 'So do you have a death wish?' After doing a beautiful walk, I feel like punching them in the nose. It's indecent. I have a life wish.

It's very easy to walk on a wire if you spend a whole lifetime practicing for it.

I am not up there by chance. I am there by choice. And I know the wire. And I know my limits. And I am a madman of details.

It is treacherous on a high wire to change your focus point and suddenly look down.

If I had been born in the circus, my parents would have pushed me on that little high wire at four years old. That's when the body is most limber to learn those acrobatics.

I walk on the wire; it's my profession, and there are no two high wire walks alike.

How could I share with you how I felt when two towers that I loved, two pieces of steel and glass and concrete fell down, when actually they took with them thousands of human lives? That is the actual tragedy. But those towers were almost human for me. I was in love with them, and that's why I married them with a tight rope.

It would be very, very dangerous for a wire walker to experience fear while he is balancing on the wire. Fear has its place on earth, before and maybe after a high-wire walk, but not during for me.

It is very normal for people on the ground to look at somebody apparently walking in midair and thinking first that person is crazy and thinking secondly that person risks his or her life.

You see, it's actually very good that a human activity is performed very close to death, because that's where life is. Life is, at its most valuable and most full, very close to the boundary of life.

The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. / That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.

The impossible - we are told - cannot be achieved. To overcome the 'impossible,' we need to use our wits and be fearless. We need to break the rules and to circumvent - some would one say to cheat.

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 am fascinated by the engineering. The science of constructing and understanding why it stands. And I am drawn by the madness, the beauty, the theatricality, the poetry and soul of the wire. And you cannot be a wire-walker without mingling those two ways of seeing life.