Quotes from Emily Maitlis

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.

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 have worked out I can quite happily jog the distance to work as long as I hail a cab first and leave my high heels on the back seat.

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.

As in life, so with television: timing is everything.

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

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

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.

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

Somehow we have to be able to indicate to our audience that we know how frustrating it is when the answers they are hearing are necessarily the answers that the person speaking them believes.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

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.

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.

So often people read conspiracy into a thing when it's really a confluence of cock-ups and the wrong button being pressed at the wrong time, or the guest you wanted gets into the wrong taxi and doesn't show up.

I did everything the wrong way round. I started in an odd place, with the wrong skill set and arguably worked backwards. I began my television career in Hong Kong, making longer format films from around Asia, then I went to the other extreme - presenting local London news.

When I interviewed a bloke wearing a balaclava on Newsnight. He refused to remove it and halfway through our interview he forgot he was wearing it, took a sip of water and couldn't find his mouth. It's quite hard to hold it together when that happens.

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.

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

There are those moments when you know that you are up against a tricky customer who is not being forthright with the truth, and there is no way you're going to let them off the hook.

The hour or so I spent with the ninety-year-old David Attenborough was one of the most beatific of my life. An oddly religious term, I know, for a man who doesn't have much truck with religion, but it was the serenity of that time that will stay with me most.

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.

I'm not sure I buy the argument that the public is more mistrustful - the debate will always garner that kind of traction because anything the BBC does is always in the spotlight.

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.

I certainly don't want to be part of a media that forces confessions from people who are not going to behave any differently the next time round.