“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Nobody ever forgets their first night in the bush. It’s among the precious, meagre handful of life firsts that remain indelible.

I still secretly believe that afternoons are the time for the test card and you shouldn’t watch television when the sun is out.

He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers’ melt waters to go back

One knows so little. When one knows more it is too late.

It will be readily admitted, that a degree conferred by an university, ought to be a pledge to the public that he who holds it possesses a certain quantity of knowledge.

As areas of knowledge grow, so too do the perimeters of ignorance.

Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

There is, however, another purpose to which academies contribute. When they consist of a limited number of persons, eminent for their knowledge, it becomes an object of ambition to be admitted on their list.

The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.

The end of all learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love and imitate Him.

Failure is predictable if you break laws, success is predictable if you obey laws. I discovered and learned that truth when I was 14 years old. Not everyone discovers that. Some people take a lifetime to learn that.