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" 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. "

Jonathan Dimbleby

Life

My Life

Media

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" I adore Madonna. She reinvents herself like no one else. "

" 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. "

" 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 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.' "

" It is easy enough to hold an opinion, but rather more testing to act on it. "

Jonathan Dimbleby

Opinion

Enough

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

Jonathan Dimbleby

Prince

Original

" 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. "

Jonathan Dimbleby

Write

Either

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

Jonathan Dimbleby

Champion

Day

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not certain that the BBC can claim to be making a wide enough range of distinctive programmes to make the case convincingly. "

" 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 fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Jonathan Dimbleby

Rich

Africa

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

Jonathan Dimbleby

Say

" 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. "

" 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. "