Top 40 Jonathan Dimbleby Quotes

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

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.

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.

Not every programme dealing with issues of global significance has to be fronted by last week’s winner of Have I Got News For You-but I suppose you might be wrong.

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

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.

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.

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.

I had no expectation that the Prince would offer me the unprecedented and unfettered access to the original and entirely untapped sources on which this biography is based.

I ought to rejoice in the fact that our principal rival has died, but I don’t.

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

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

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.

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

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

The BBC produces wonderful programmes; it also produces a load of old rubbish.

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

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.

Ethiopia is engraved on my heart. I first went in 1973 because I heard of a terrible famine. They were denying it even as we got the film out. The coverage destroyed the emperor’s credibility.

I’ve never been a depressive, but I felt quite close to the edge at times. But you never know what’s around the corner. Mercifully, what’s around the corner is joy.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

You have to be damn certain you’re putting something better in its place.

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

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

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

For a few months when I was about 17, I smoked a small cigar because I thought it looked cool and it would get me the girls. It didn’t.

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.

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.

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

The long, forensic interview really matters.

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.

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.

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.