Jonathan Dimbleby Quotes
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Anyone who thinks that you become a journalist or broadcaster in order to be a wallflower needs to think again.
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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.
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The challenge is the culture. You have to have a vision for the BBC-it can't merely be that it's big and has a place in the market.
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The BBC has the obligation to think big. And at the moment, that clarion call sounds an uncertain note to me.
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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.
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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.
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I honestly believe that TV generally is obsessed with the ratings battle to the point of cutting its own throat.
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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.
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As it is, the grotesque distortions of the global market mean that for every dollar the West dispatches to Africa in the form of aid, two dollars are clawed back through subsidies and tariff barriers: a monumental rip-off by the rich as they instruct the poor to accept 'free' trade or else.
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I was obliged to play the piano, like middle-class children are. I didn't start to love it until I was 14.
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My two great treats in life are baked beans and vanilla ice-cream.
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I don't love the media. I'm part of it, but you can't love a porcupine.
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As a young man, causes of one kind or another engaged me, and I thought the media is where you express yourself in that. I lived with the illusion, for quite a long time, that if you described something accurately, something would be done about it.
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I used to hunt as a child but gave up the chase in my 'Ho Ho Ho Chi-Minh, we shall fight and we shall win' chanting and marching days - by which time I had come to share Oscar Wilde's feelings about 'the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won't be using long words.
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That test should not be about ratings. What should weigh is the knowledge that a public broadcaster delivers programmes that matter.
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It is easy enough to hold an opinion, but rather more testing to act on it.
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The BBC produces wonderful programmes; it also produces a load of old rubbish.
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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.
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I hate flying. My stomach churns at the mere thought of it.