I learned to be a hot-air balloon pilot to take tourists over the Masai Mara Reserve in order to earn some money and finance the work I was doing with my wife, Anne. We were studying the life of a family of lions for more than two years. Taking pictures was a way to capture information we could not put in words.
I love Africa, and Ulusaba, our home in South Africa, is pretty special. It's on a rocky hill overlooking the bush, and from your room, you can see lions stalking zebras by the waterhole.
When people talk about South Africa, it's all about lions and elephants. But when we talk about India, we talk about tigers.
I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realized photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography
I grew up near London Zoo, with which I was obsessed. I would lie in bed at night, thinking about the lions and tigers and wolves that were prowling only a few miles away.
In first grade, I told my friends I had a third story in my house filled with jewels and lions.
If you could cross a lion and a monkey, that's what I'd be, because monkeys are funny and lions are strong.
If cattle and horses, or lions, had hands, or were able to draw with their feet and produce the works which men do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make the gods' bodies the same shape as their own.
It's fun to just get out there and have a nice conversation when I'm running. To be honest, when I do longer runs, the trail that I like to run up in Malibu has mountain lions, so I always feel I want to run with someone else.
Satan prowls but he's a lion on a leash
It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.
I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.
No other creatures of the savannah sleep as deeply or as soundly as lions, but after all, lions are the main reason for not sleeping soundly.
There is something really mysterious about lions. They could rip you apart if they wanted to, but at the same time they look so cuddly. Can you imagine what humans look like to animals? They must think we're so weird.
As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.
There is no comparison. The American landscape is so much more dangerous. They have real snakes, mountain lions, bears; we only have adders, and they're more frightened of us than we are of them.
The spirit of L.A. is untamed wilderness. It's earthquakes and wildfires and oceans and mountain lions and fog. There's great physical beauty.
Love transforms our fear into courage like the once cowardly Lion of Oz.
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