Dean Potter

“I grew up in the 1970s. It was a super open-minded time. I was taught through my parents and TV that everything was possible. You'd see cartoons where superheroes would fly. I always wanted to do these things.”

“I had a unique style, I didn't care about how things were done in the past, and I just did what felt natural, 'No Rules' once again.”

“People think I'm a lunatic or adrenaline junkie, but that's not what's going on with me. The beauty is what I'm most concerned with.”

“There are many people who parachute and many people who climb. I'm the only person who does both.”

“With my height in high school, I was really thinking basketball. But I guess I wasn't that good, because my sophomore year I didn't make the team. That was a really brutal moment for me.”

“People think that in order for nature to be sacred, you have to separate yourself from it.”

“I hydrate obsessively, limit processed foods, and make a conscious attempt to eat and drink pure things, organic foods. I've noticed that these things stay with me longer than processed foods and that I'm more consistent in my climbing and my life - there aren't so many highs and lows.”

“I've made the safest slack line ever using Vectran. It's the strongest flexible fabric in the world.”

“I practice the art of no rules.”

“My parents didn't want to believe their son was 200 feet up, free-soloing. They liked to go on long walks and runs, and they would go right by Joe English. Later they'd say, 'Hey, we saw someone climbing up there.' They would describe what they saw, and I'd be wearing the exact same outfit. And I'd say, 'Oh... Nope, wasn't me!'”

“I'm more proud of how many times I haven't jumped than how many times I have jumped. Sometimes walking down, I've saved my life.”

“My feet look like hooves-like, fake-leather bottoms and funky toenails - and I scrub them with a big stiff-bristled nylon brush you'd use for scrubbing the side of your house.”

“Wing-suit flying can be safe if you are highly practiced and skilled and follow the fundamental rules of questioning yourself and waiting or walking down when something doesn't seem 'right.'”

“If I have a combination of calm and fear, I access mental states way beyond normal consciousness. That's why I choose to do scary things.”

“I know I'm just as mortal as everybody else and I think about that quite a bit, but I really do feel like everyone lives with this - they're just not aware of it.”

“In climbing, if you injure just one finger you can't do it. But with slacklining as long as you can walk, you can walk the line.”

“I was having all these thoughts, not really sure what I was doing in school. And I just said, 'I'm gonna go out and climb.' I had this great day with a friend, bouldering and rooting each other on, and I came back thinking, 'I don't like the way it feels to be competitive. I don't want to be ruled by it.'”

“This concept of turning dying into flying is a metaphor for my basic life principle.”

“Everybody kind of fantasizes about it, flying.”

“I don't have thoughts of an afterlife. I think dying is like when you swat a fly - it's over.”