“You either get the point of Africa or you don’t. What draws me back year after year is that it’s like seeing the world with the lid off.”

A lobster bisque ought to be the crowning glory of the potager. And this one was excellent. Silky as a gigolo’s compliment and fishy as a chancellor’s promise.

We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

The reason that chefs become chefs is that they’re not allowed into rooms with windows.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

The truth and the facts aren’t necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.

Television gives us the gift to see ourselves as we’d like to be seen.

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they’re both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.

Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.

Beautifully shot, impeccably paced, it was a clear, unrelenting look at the National Trust, its friends and enemies, and it makes you want to burn your passport and beg the Luftwaffe to have another go.

Americans think the only funny Brits are John Cleese, Benny Hill and whoever makes our toothpaste. They’re not laughing with us, they are laughing at us.

I don’t know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties.

There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].

I’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t.