Jeremy Wade

“Fish don't have hands; to investigate, they open their mouth, and sometimes it's someone's foot.”

“Normally, you want the river when the water is low and not when it's flooded. For example, there are parts of the Amazon where the water goes up to 15 meters high. This floods the forest, so a lot of the fish that normally stay close together are suddenly very hard to find.”

“The thing about the oceans is there is the benefit of water clarity. You can see what's going on there, but a lot of fresh water is murky. You just can't see what's there and I think, for that reason, rivers haven't featured so much on wildlife TV.”

“A river without monsters is a scarier prospect because it means the water is unhealthy.”

“But the whole reason I fish is that you never know for sure what is down there. Unless you drained Loch Ness you will never be certain what's living in it.”

“The way that we live with potentially dangerous animals is not to kill them, but to understand them and to coexist with them.”

“I grew up in a little village in England that had a river running through it so I've been fishing from a very early age, maybe seven or eight.”

“The most fascinating and satisfying encounter so far was the goliath tigerfish of the Congo. I first caught one in 1991, and then again while filming the second season of 'River Monsters' in 2009. Its appearance is quite unbelievable, like a giant piranha, with inch-long interlocking teeth.”

“I've become an accidental anthropologist.”

“There are some species, one was the Goliath Tigerfish, that took me six years to track down and catch.”

“The great thing about freshwater fish is most of them are incredibly ugly, a lot of them are, so no one can fail to look good next to some of these things.”

“I gave up fishing in England. It got too crowded.”

“I don't see myself as a particularly expert angler.”

“Fishermen can be very superstitious and sometimes you do find yourself thinking, this fish has got a curse on it, it's just not going to happen.”

“One of my favorite fish is the Arapaima. It lives in the Amazon and they grow maybe nine feet long and one might weigh two of me.”

“With 'River Monsters', I am the investigator: here's the crime scene, I talk to witnesses, I establish a suspects list, I narrow it down; here's the prime suspect, I go and arrest the prime suspect - who often doesn't want to come quietly.”

“One place that I have very strong memories of is the Congo. That's somewhere I've been to four times. It's not a place where normally outsiders go, which is what makes it very special.”

“The arapaima, found in South America, has an elongated body and a head so bony that the male fish will sometimes kill each other with a nifty headbutt. It's believed to be the biggest freshwater fish in the world.”

“With 'River Monsters,' it sometimes didn't matter if the story was made up or exaggerated.”

“Everything starts with fishermen's tales. Everywhere you go the fishermen talk.”