Jonathan Dimbleby Quotes

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 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 adore Madonna. She reinvents herself like no one else.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 was a reluctant convert, and I am by no means a zealot. But the evidence is compelling: to write off wind-power is either ill-informed or dishonest.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The long, forensic interview really matters.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.