Quotes from Jonathan Dimbleby

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.

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 was born with a silver microphone in my mouth, and that was an advantage. My father wrote books and was also a great broadcaster.

The long, forensic interview really matters.

It's absolutely fine to think of new ways of doing things, and I'm not just asking for the traditional reporter to look into our living rooms night after night.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.