To be able to create fully, it's maybe fine that you learn the rules, but you have to forget and to rebel against those rules.

I have been performing in the street for more than 50 years: magic for basically 60 years, and the high wire 45 years. The beauty of it is that it's never the same. It's never easy. And yet, part of my art is to make it look easy.

I started making monkey bridges, like kids do, and climbing and rappelling with ropes. Very naturally, I needed some knots. At the very beginning, I didn't care, I didn't know, and then slowly I started to know, and I started to care. I wanted to know more knots or the right knot for the special action.

I did a walk in 1973 illegally in the northern side of the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Every year, I am conscious of the anniversary of my 1974 World Trade Center walk.

I have a fear of water, believe it or not. To put a wire 12 feet over a swimming pool frightens me. I don't like water.

Usually, when I walk on a wire, I inspect the anchor point on both sides before crossing.

It's very normal - when you're not used to the world of the high wire, it's very normal to be simply terrified. The reason I'm not is because I've done it for so many years.

I've been arrested many times for illegal high wire walking and illegal street performing.

Right after my Twin Towers walk, I was approached by hundreds of people, and I said no to all the offers. I could have become a millionaire overnight, obviously, but I said no, and I continue to be uninterested.

What I think tailors the creativity of most people are the rules that we learn from the age we are very small - in school, our parents.

I was thrown out of different schools because I was practicing my arts - magic, juggling, and the high wire.

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.

It's part of my life to feel like a criminal, to have eyes in my back and see if I'm being followed. It's a feeling that comes from street juggling because I have been arrested so many times.

If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.

When you are a young person, the world is yours. You can do the impossible.

I will never fall prey to celebrity because I am too busy. I have other things to do than look at myself in the mirror.

My time is always divided when I prepare for a wire walk. First I dream, technically and artistically, and then I go to work, and I am the master rigger, climbing trees and ladders and constructing. Only then I change my cap and become the performer.

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.

Notre Dame and Sydney - that was nothing. Notre Dame doesn't have a police station; it is not 1,000 or so feet high. It was a public structure, very easy to access. And Sydney Harbour Bridge was half-and-half: a bridge, in the middle of the night. The World Trade Center was the end of the world. Electronic devices, police dogs.

I am a wire-walker. I can walk any time, anywhere - I'm indestructible.

Wire-walking in performance is one thing - I never fell, of course. If I had, I wouldn't be here talking about it.

In my life, I wanted to meet certain people. I never met Charlie Chaplin, but I met Werner Herzog.

Obsessed people are not humorless at all.

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.

When art in general, and film in particular, succeeds is when it pulls you away onto a voyage. Then it's a good film.

Talking about theater, actually, I built a little barn in upstate New York, and I call it 'the smallest theater in the world,' but it has a mini stage and a red velvet curtain.

Certainly, in the story of my life, the walk between the Twin Towers was one of the grandest, one of the most memorable, but not solely the grandest and the most memorable.

I would like to continue to tell stories of what I did in a biographical way, so I will continue to write.

I was not born into the world of the stuntman and the daredevil; I was born into the world of theater and writing and sculpting and classical music.

I'm a wire-walker, but actually, I'm a moviemaker that hasn't done his first movie.

When I was learning by myself, despite my parents, despite my teachers, despite society, when I was fighting for building my life as a young wire walker at age 16, I didn't have feelings, I had certainties.

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.

Of course, the slightest little mistake on the wire will deprive me of my life, so in that sense, yes, it is a dangerous profession. You have to pay attention; if not, you will lose your life.

My parents wanted me to have an honorable profession and not to be a jester.

As a high wire walker, I do not allow myself to 'leave the wire' during a performance.

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.

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's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

My first walk illegally at 20 years old was between the towers of Notre Dame.

I wanted all my life to give my world into other arts - books, plays, movies - but I didn't want to sell out.

I didn't go to school much. I was thrown out of different schools, and my university is the street.

Metaphorically speaking, of course, if I put a problem behind my pillow and fall asleep, very often because my brain went to sleep with that idea or the problem alive, very often in the middle of the night I wake up, and I wake up with a solution or with a direction of solution.