“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 deplore the loss of arts on BBC One and Two.”

“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 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.”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”