for a fat kid like me, it felt like Mount Everest.

I climbed Mount Everest. I don't quit.

So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.

No one remembers who climbed Mount Everest the second time.

After retiring, I was a little bored with nothing to do and got fat. I thought, if a 60-year-old metabolic fat man, after five years, can get to Mount Everest, that would be very exciting.

If it is a shame to be the second man on Mount Everest, then I will have to live with this shame.