Top 44 Louis Theroux Quotes

I am genuinely a bit confused about the world, a little bit bumbling.

I’m not pugnacious or argumentative. I’d probably feel fear going into a pub in the Outback.

Some things should remain private.

I would love to make a film in the outback or in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. I know that it’s not in Australia, but it’s not too far.

Empires will come and go. The Soviet Union collapses; China can become a superpower, but ‘Blue Peter’ stays the same.

I don’t feel that as human beings we have an obligation to dislike someone based on their beliefs, and it’s OK to have a human reaction to someone even if you feel what they do is hideous and objectionable. You can still enjoy their company and find them interesting to be around.

Do I care about clothes and stuff? Not much. It’s a bit sick, isn’t it, people spending all that money on clothes? I’m too stingy. I wouldn’t pay £100 for a shirt.

I think he could win, absolutely. I think he could win because there’s Trump supporters out there who aren’t even revealing themselves as such. For me, that’s a scary prospect because I think he’d be a disastrous president.

Celebrity is quite a fraught word. It is not something I aspire to, but I can certainly see why it could be.

The thing is, I have never been that confident, and, um, I have a lot of self-doubt, and I had never – I don’t think I ever would have consciously chosen to be a television presenter.

Not counting the brand of Sunni Islam practised by the so-called Islamic State, there is probably no religion in the world that comes in for more flak than Scientology.

Arguably, there’s an emotional side of life that I’m not always completely plugged into.

I just follow the subjects I’m interested in.

Sometimes you shoot for 40 or 50 hours for a one-hour show, and you have to make some very hard choices.

After studying the subject for years, watching countless YouTube videos of Scientology handlers filming critics and journalists, it felt amazing to be on the receiving end myself: I felt like I’d been blooded.

True believers of Scientology seem to know with utmost certainty that they have found the answer to the deepest riddles of all time – they may or may not be right, but that kind of self-belief is very appealing.

In my normal way of doing things, there’s a little bit of ‘going native’ that takes place, where you’re in a world long enough, you can’t really help but start to see things in a nuanced, more humanistic way. Just because you’re with people and you start to, in general, slightly like the people you’re with.

I think I have a slight fear of intimacy.

I’m not trying to acquire a reputation as serious documentary maker for its own sake.

Clearly I’m able to read emotions. But I do feel… What is it? Awkwardness. I’m not a slick dude. That’s what it comes down to. The nakedness, the guilelessness… that’s quite real.

Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets, and we name our animals, but we’re not too worried about industrial hunting practices.

Funnily enough, the most danger I felt was when I did a story about exotic animals kept as pets in America.

I sometimes get accused of being ‘faux-naive,’ but for me, it’s really just about getting down to the basics of something.

There is no religion that has a monopoly on bigotry.

Meeting forensic patients for the first time could occasionally be an unnerving experience. They often came across as mild and gentle people, but the details of the crimes were harrowing in the extreme.

There have been times when I’ve felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making ‘The Most Hated Family in America’ about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.

My guilty fear is that what I’m doing, probably anyone could do. And that I just got a lot of lucky breaks.

I think people are so immersed in the anti-Scientology mindset by consuming tabloid media and stories about space aliens. It’s baffling. When I say I want to see a more positive side of the church, all I’m saying is I want to get past these headlines that talk about aliens and Tom Cruise jumping on a sofa.

Prisons and jails, I tend to feel that you’re actually safer as a journalist than you might think, certainly more than it appears.

We have a double agenda of trying to deliver something exciting that people will talk about and will brighten their day and will amaze people and make us proud to have created an object of beauty. And on the other hand being true to the story.

I don’t think I’m afraid of anything.

It’s in the DNA of all the shows that I have done that are about people that are dealing with very stressful situations that are giving them a lot of angst.

I’ve got an interest in Zimbabwe. I spent a few months there before uni, so I’d like to get back to that.

All religions are, in some basic sense, irrational.

‘Cunnamulla’ is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.

I have been to a few A-list parties, but not massively. It’s not my life, but it’s fun dipping into it.

L.A. is the opposite of Britain in a lot of respects, and that’s what draws so many British people here.

I think what I’m good at is getting to know people and trying to build a relationship over a few weeks and trying to get to the truth.

I try not to be too judgmental.

I’ve always seen TV as… it didn’t occupy the same rarefied space as literature, but it’s art you can use day to day. I’ve never been hung up on where it figures in the hierarchy of learning.

As a BBC broadcaster, I really do hope that the new incarnation of ‘Top Gear’ with Chris Evans does well.

I was always attracted and repelled by the idea of being a writer.

I think Donald Trump’s had a pattern of leaping on the bandwagon of anything that he feels will further his candidacy, and if that means sowing more fear and paranoia and playing into a kind of xenophobic populist strain, then that’s what he will do.

The documentary genre, shows like ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘The Jinx’ on HBO, there’s been a whole raft of long-form docs.