I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the Guardian hating me.
From Jeremy Clarkson
I don't think I am particularly funny. In fact, I know I'm not.
When I was 16, I wanted to look like Lord Byron. It's not really a haircut so much as a hair-not-cut, but I've never changed it. It's a bit Byron, a bit Don Juan DeMarco and other things that I aspire to be.
I have a pathological terror of falling through ice. I nearly drowned once. I fell off a boat and got a cramp, and was rescued by an oil-rig diver, a great bear of a man who simply leant into the water and scooped me out with one finger.
I'm not capable of having an affair. You can ask my wife. I'm not physically capable.
I read in the papers how much I'm earning and fall about laughing because I'm sure it's not that much; otherwise, I'd have an enormous boat. I'm literally not the slightest bit interested in money. I just don't pay any attention to money; it's rather vulgar.
We all know that small cars are good for us. But so is cod liver oil. And jogging. I want to drive around in a Terminator, not the heroine in an E. M. Forster novel.
The problem is that television executives have got it into their heads that if one presenter on a show is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed heterosexual boy, the other must be a either black gay or a lesbian. Chalk and cheese, they reckon, works.
Argentina and Burma. I have been to most of the countries in the world, but not those two. I want to shoot doves in Argentina. Burma, of course, because no one has really been there.
I dish the dirt out, and I can take it. But why should my mother and children have to take it? In 20 years, I have taken any number of stories, most of which are not true, without a murmur of complaint. But some stories you have to draw the line and say No.
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