Jeremy Clarkson

“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 don't think I am particularly funny. In fact, I know I'm not.”

“If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth.”

“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.”

“If you're writing, it means getting up and writing all day, and if you're filming, it's getting up and filming all day. I get up, go to my computer, write, turn it off, and go to bed. That is a Clarkson day.”

“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.”

“Column writing is like gas - it fills the available space.”

“I think people who watch 'Top Gear' think they're the only ones watching it, which I quite like, because it can hopefully last for a long time.”

“No really. If you only have seven years left, that means the Reaper will be dropping round for tea and buns in about 61,000 hours from now. You therefore shouldn’t be wasting time by pootling to the garden centre at walking pace. So come on, grandad. The clock’s ticking. Pedal to the metal. Or you’ll be in your flowerbed before the plants you bought.”

“I'm not capable of having an affair. You can ask my wife. I'm not physically capable.”

“I've been told by the BBC that if I make one more offensive remark, anywhere, at any time, I will be sacked. And even the angel Gabriel would struggle to survive with that hanging over his head. It's inevitable that one day, someone, somewhere will say that I've offended them, and that will be that.”

“These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children’s ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn’t stop there. They don’t even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising. Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. ‘What would happen,’ said the man from health and safety, ‘if a cameraman were to slip over?’ ‘Well,’ I would reply, ‘he’d probably have to stand up again.”

“I have had an amazingly fortunate life. I'm a child from Yorkshire, which is sort of like Cleveland without the pretty bits.”

“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 black Muslim lesbian.”

“Ambition is a very dangerous thing because either you achieve it and your life ends prematurely, or you don't, in which case your life is a constant source of disappointment. You must never have ambition.”

“I dish the dirt out and I can take it. But why should my mother and children have to take it?”

“You take out an injunction against somebody or some organisation and immediately news of that injunction and the people involved and the story behind the injunction is in a legal-free world on Twitter and the Internet. It's pointless.”

“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.”

“I like to be loved by my children, and I quite like the Guardian hating me.”