Jonathan Dimbleby Quotes

Travelling to make television programmes means I have some unusual food memories. In Pasto, Colombia, I was taken to a restaurant where I chose my meat for the evening from a cage of white rats. It tasted perfectly good – like rabbit.

I have a great deal of joy in my life, and I’m very fortunate. That combination makes you aware of just how wonderful life can be on the one hand and how dreadful it can be for people on the other. You can’t be happy in isolation.

I hate flying. My stomach churns at the mere thought of it.

In the world in which we live, truth is an ancillary virtue, but it shouldn’t be.

The long, forensic interview really matters.

My two great treats in life are baked beans and vanilla ice-cream.

Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won’t be using long words.

Anyone who thinks that you become a journalist or broadcaster in order to be a wallflower needs to think again.

Recently, I had a hip resurfaced. It’s different from a hip replacement because it’s done with titanium. I like to think that it’s the consequence of riding horses so strenuously, but I fear it’s much more mundane and was just early-onset arthritis.

That test should not be about ratings. What should weigh is the knowledge that a public broadcaster delivers programmes that matter.

I was born with a silver microphone in my mouth, and that was an advantage. My father wrote books and was also a great broadcaster.

It is easy enough to hold an opinion, but rather more testing to act on it.

I was obliged to play the piano, like middle-class children are. I didn’t start to love it until I was 14.

I’m not certain that the BBC can claim to be making a wide enough range of distinctive programmes to make the case convincingly.

I deplore the loss of arts on BBC One and Two.

I don’t love the media. I’m part of it, but you can’t love a porcupine.

The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.

I honestly believe that TV generally is obsessed with the ratings battle to the point of cutting its own throat.

Over the last two years, I have been able to comb through The Prince’s archives. I have been free to read his journals, diaries and many thousands of the letters.

Presidents and prime ministers, whether they live in the rich or the poor world, are insulated and isolated from the devastating impact of global poverty. They read the statistics, but they rarely witness at first hand the misery and degradation of life on a dollar a day.

I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for.

I was disappointed not to be able to interview Mr. Clinton. I met him two years ago. I was looking forward to talking with him about issues from Africa to terrorism.

I adore Madonna. She reinvents herself like no one else.

Food is important to me, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a gourmet. I don’t like tricksy food.

Food is about communal togetherness. Our family does sit at the table. I think it’s a great tragedy if a family doesn’t have a table, as there is such an atmosphere of good will and warmth when we have eight people sitting around it.

At home in Devon, my wife Jessica does a huge proportion of the cooking – I do the basics. My timing is extremely good, particularly when it comes to vegetables, perhaps because in my work, timing is everything. I know exactly what fits into a minute when broadcasting, and I apply the same to carrots.

I cycle, I take an hour’s strenuous walk in the evening, I play tennis twice a week with a trainer, and I sail. I used to ride horses professionally – I’d ride seven or eight horses a day, so I had to be fit for that.

I have to grit my teeth sometimes, knowing I am going to be written about. But I think it is my life, and I don’t want to get people interested in debating it. But I do feel that if you are going to put yourself about as a public person on a television screen, there’s a curiosity.

While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.

Rolling my trousers down to expose the upper part of my buttocks and having a knife pressed up and down my spine by a Russian white witch, as she murmured incantations, was certainly a new experience to cure my backache. It was surprisingly soothing.

My only real claim to fame is that I was southern England show-jumping champion in 1966. The day after my father died, ‘Horse & Hound’ magazine tipped me as a future Olympic champion, and I took it seriously. You can only really enjoy something if you take it seriously.

The BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me.

It’s absolutely fine to think of new ways of doing things, and I’m not just asking for the traditional reporter to look into our living rooms night after night.