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

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

Get up now and go and find Robert Kilroy-Silk. Smile in a warm, friendly sort of way, then punch him on the nose. Now go and find Robert on television, despite my best endeavours, this is still relatively easy to do. Wait for a close-up, same smile, and punch him on the nose. If you followed the instructions carefully, you will have noticed a distinct difference. On the one hand, you were suffused with a sense of public-spirited righteousness; on the other, you're probably dribbling blood. That's the difference between reality in life and reality on television.

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.

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.

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