Top 30 Emily Maitlis Quotes

It starts with denigrating experts so people don’t trust facts, then it destabilises institutions, then it works to get its message out in the media, so that’s what people cling to.

I hear some horror stories from other channels, and I think what a blessing to work with a team of people that you’re genuinely happy to hang with. I don’t feel I need to dominate ‘Newsnight.’

I am addicted to the highlighter pen, my papers generally a garish mix of type, Biro, unreadable scribble and lashings of luminosity, as if they belong to the unhinged.

Some interviews wind you up. Some test your mettle. Some reduce you to a gibbering wreck.

I have three different groups of girlfriends and I swear to you, we put the world to rights between 8.15 and whenever we end. Some days there’s a lot of running and a bit of talking, some days there’s a lot of talking and a bit of running. But by the end I’m oxygenated and body-tired, as opposed to mind-tired.

I actually think in a funny way, I feel better at TV now. As I get older, I know what I think and I know what works and I enjoy it more.

The only routine I have is going for a run and a swim with the dog in the morning, between 8am and 9am – that is my head-clearing space. I am religious about holding on to that time: whatever happens, I don’t want to know about it until after that.

I have heard somewhere an argument that if the Industrial Revolution – economic development – had started in Africa rather than Europe, then sun and wave technology would now be at the forefront, not the old fossil fuels.

I remember the Silver Jubilee clearly because we had a fancy dress street party in Sheffield. I dressed up as a Japanese girl with a too-big red kimono – cultural appropriation hadn’t been invented in 1977. I was six.

I moved from current affairs to daily news over the Asia crisis of 1998 – mainly because the news agenda demanded I become economically literate.

The stuff we have been told off record tends to be the stuff that is true and the stuff we are told on record on camera tends to be the stuff that is not so true.

I am always impressed by interviewers who can do the whole thing without notes. I can’t. I need reminders on my knee. Dates, first names, quotes in bold text.

We’re not robots. There isn’t a perfect formula for an interview and there are days when you bring too much of you and there are days, quite honestly, when you don’t bring enough of you.

It’s arguing, in a very good and positive way. It’s sort of sitting down and pulling an argument apart. I think that’s a very oddly Jewish thing. And it’s the chaos of family and a slight sort of cosy messiness of it all.

My eldest son you know, in his short life so far, he’s experimented with Corbynism, Communism, Brexit. He’s now Welsh nationalist and libertarian.

To switch off, I will take a sleeping pill if I have to. I also found myself realigning things.

A friend and me took the slowboat from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1993.

I’d like to get up and instantly have perfectly blow-dried hair.

It is the little things that throw me – the wrong pen, the wrong font. An interview done standing up is a disaster. I need my knees to rest notes on.

Is television a lookist industry? Of course it is.

If you interrupt somebody too early, if you miss it and don’t interrupt at all – that’s the difference between a good interview and a bad interview. It’s about the absolute moment.

You sort of assume that everyone knows how television works, but they don’t actually, why should they?

I have facial blindness. It’s hugely embarrassing as it makes me seem supercilious or snobbish.

Fanny and Alexander’ blew me away. I was visiting my sister in her first year at university. It was my first foray into something dark.

I think what I notice now is that a lot of the things that are said to us on camera on air are not particularly believed and quite often not true and its an extraordinary position to be in when you’ve had WhatsApp messages, text messages off record.

I was a terrible reporter. The only advantage was I made all my mistakes in a place and at a time where I didn’t know anyone, but I literally made every mistake in the book.

I find I process the news by listening to someone else’s report.

I’ve ended up in prison a number of times, once in Cambodia, once in Cuba – for hours rather than days.

Women often seem to have a fear of being ‘found out’. Of thinking they’ve pulled the wool over their boss’s eyes to get a job they don’t deserve. I thought like that for years – but I’m massively over it now.

I suddenly realize why David Attenborough is the giant he is. It is not just his geographic curiosity, not just his anthropological understanding, not just his gift for narration that simultaneously calms the soul and inspires the mind. It is that behind it all there is such a deep thinker.