Jonathan Dimbleby's Quotes

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

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

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

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

Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won't be using long words.

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.

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

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.

The long, forensic interview really matters.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not every programme dealing with issues of global significance has to be fronted by last week's winner of Have I Got News For You-but I suppose you might be wrong.

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.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.