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Jonathan Dimbleby Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from Jonathan Dimbleby


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


Until I was 21, I wasn't going into the media. I was a professional show jumper; I was going to have a farm... Then my father died, and it changed my life. I realised I had to have a go at being a journalist to see if I could cut the mustard.


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.


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.


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.


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.'


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


The long, forensic interview really matters.


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


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


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.


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 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.


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


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.


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 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.


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


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


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