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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The long, forensic interview really matters.

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.

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

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.

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 deplore the loss of arts on BBC One and Two.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Food is about communal togetherness. Our family does sit at the table. I think it's a great tragedy if a family doesn't have a table, as there is such an atmosphere of good will and warmth when we have eight people sitting around it.

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

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 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.

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

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.

The difference between talking on your cell phone while driving and speaking with a passenger is huge. The person on the other end of the cell phone is chattering away, oblivious.

If we're talking about masculinity and tenderness, I don't look at Clinton.

I don't know where the stock market is going, but I will say this, that if it continues higher, this will do more to stimulate the economy than anything we've been talking about today or anything anybody else was talking about.

There's nothing worse than talking about yourself to find out that you're not that interesting.

Colonel Parker asked Henry and me to come to Elvis' suite and have breakfast. There were at least five policemen stationed up there. He was talking on the telephone.

I'll be helping them getting suited up, getting them in the airlock, getting the airlock prepared, and getting them out the hatch, and then talking them through these three spacewalks.

I don't see this planet being... they're talking about how they're turning around the environmental problems here, but I think it's already too late.

Over and over again, financial experts and wonkish talking heads endeavor to explain these mysterious, 'toxic' financial instruments to us lay folk. Over and over, they ignobly fail, because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them.

I don't know how much influence we really had, because we never put our pictures on the albums or anything and we never really promoted the Talking Heads connection, because we wanted to keep it separate from Talking Heads.

I do not believe that I have had an interview with anybody in twenty-five years in which the person to whom I was talking was not annoyed during the early part of the interview by my asking stupid questions.

I never took my SAT's. I never applied to college. I moved right out here and jumped into the thick of things. Whether that was the smart move or not, I'm sitting here talking to you now, so it paid off.

But let's be clear. We're talking about a country where there's no opposition. As leader he can ignore Parliament and - sorry that's Tony Blair isn't it? Um, so he doesn't even have to ask the country before he goes to war - sorry that's still Tony Blair.

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

We need people out talking about the President, explaining, agreeing with and praising his actions.

I was on Oprah's show recently talking about the people who impacted me the most. One was a teacher and one was my soccer coach. I didn't even go into my family, who had the most influence.

I love talking about women because they are a constant study and you're always learning.

When people screamed novelty the first time around talking about an ugly video and stuff I was really insulted because, hold on a minute, everyone you see in the video are real life.

We all laughed. It was more like that whole thing that I was talking about earlier. You go to training camp and after the season is over, you might not see the guys for six months until you go back to training camp.

If you watch the show and the characters don't look at each other while they're talking, the actors probably aren't getting along.

An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.

A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons program.