Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Louis Theroux - Page 2

I'm not pugnacious or argumentative. I'd probably feel fear going into a pub in the Outback.

There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.

There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most Hated Family in America' about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.

Reflecting the truth sounds easy, but sometimes it's not.

I've always enjoyed painting, but I went to teach in schools in Zimbabwe instead.

It is important to note that most of the patients in Ohio's mental health facilities have never committed crimes. They are institutionalised because they have lost touch with reality and are having problems functioning unaided in the community.

I really do try not to emote. I don't like seeing it on documentaries - it seems a bit unprofessional. I also need to be human being and be a kind of sympathetic presence for the contributors I'm with, so there' a line you have to walk.

I don't feel that as human beings we have an obligation to dislike someone based on their beliefs, and it's OK to have a human reaction to someone even if you feel what they do is hideous and objectionable. You can still enjoy their company and find them interesting to be around.

Celebrity is quite a fraught word. It is not something I aspire to, but I can certainly see why it could be.

I never thought I would really like to be on television, and the story of me getting into it was quite lucky, really, just a series of chance encounters. So I am not exactly putting myself across as a celebrity, although people might perceive me that way.

Sometimes you shoot for 40 or 50 hours for a one-hour show, and you have to make some very hard choices.

I never want to feel more than the viewers. I'm not trying to be an automaton. It's like when you see people laughing on camera, and you don't find it funny as a viewer - it's an offputting experience.

The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.

In my normal way of doing things, there's a little bit of 'going native' that takes place, where you're in a world long enough, you can't really help but start to see things in a nuanced, more humanistic way. Just because you're with people and you start to, in general, slightly like the people you're with.

A lot of money could be saved if we ate urban wildlife.

As a father of two children, I am used to seeing kids in the midst of a five-alarm meltdown over the choice of DVD or the necessity of broccoli.

'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.

I didn't think, 'I'd really like to work in TV; maybe I could carve out a niche where I talk to people who are somehow involved in marginal or difficult lifestyles... ' It was something I gravitated to very naturally as a subject area, almost instinctively, and somehow turned into a TV career without meaning to.

I've always slightly harboured a dream of making a film, a documentary feature. Somehow, I just got into a way of working a routine of making TV docs.

Prisons and jails, I tend to feel that you're actually safer as a journalist than you might think, certainly more than it appears.

In west London where I live, white people are a minority. In the area I am in, which is the borough of Brent, whites are less than 50%.

Do I care about clothes and stuff? Not much. It's a bit sick, isn't it, people spending all that money on clothes? I'm too stingy. I wouldn't pay £100 for a shirt.

I don't like watching things where I think the people onscreen are ahead of me or assuming I know something that I don't know.

It's difficult to describe the weirdness of speaking to a man who appears to be perfectly in control of his faculties, who can deliver off-the-cuff repartee, and yet who is actually utterly disconnected from who he is.

Look after your body, because I'm 44, and things are happening that I never dreamed of - like bad joints and man boobs!

When it was time to meet a chimpanzee, I got very, very anxious because they have the strength of ten men, so I hear.

For publicity purposes, everything gets simplified, and the fact that I wear glasses and am somewhat bookish makes me a geek. That's fine; there needs to be a shorthand, but there are important geek traits that I don't really share.

I am always drawn to things that feel different to what I would experience at home: things that offer a combination of unfamiliarity and a sort of bleak glamour. I think the outback has that.

There's obviously a lot of controversy around the issue of hunting as there is around gambling, and I like these stories where there is a moral dimension, stories that force you to think about your prejudices about a subject and explore the extent to which they are justified.

I've discovered I am quite a puritanical person.

I sometimes get accused of being 'faux-naive,' but for me, it's really just about getting down to the basics of something.

Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets, and we name our animals, but we're not too worried about industrial hunting practices.

I don't go around saturated in guilt or anything like that. I do worry about things quite a lot, but I don't feel as though I am a bad person.

The many ways of getting content for free have slashed the profits of the professionals in their respective fields.

I think he could win, absolutely. I think he could win because there's Trump supporters out there who aren't even revealing themselves as such. For me, that's a scary prospect because I think he'd be a disastrous president.

When you don't have access to a subject, and all you have is ex-members and critics, there is this gravitational pull toward telling a certain version of events. Scientology would say this, and they have a point, that it's like doing a portrait of a marriage in which you're only hearing from the ex-wife and not the ex-husband.

The thing is, I have never been that confident, and, um, I have a lot of self-doubt, and I had never - I don't think I ever would have consciously chosen to be a television presenter.

As much as the glasses, it's the Englishness and the gangliness. The apparent lack of muscularity... they indicate I'm not a macho man.

I would love to make a film in the outback or in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. I know that it's not in Australia, but it's not too far.

The fact is that you can be a Nazi living in a little trailer in the middle of Montana and as awful as everything you stand for is, you're basically an angry guy in a shack. Scientology, on the other hand, is a multi-billion dollar institution with tentacles that reach into lots of countries. I don't think it's as powerful as many people think it is, but compared to the sorts of people I've dealt with, it is a force to be reckoned with. It has global influence and very very deep pockets.

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.

The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.

Weird Weekends set out to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting. To me, it's almost a privilege to be welcomed into these communities and to shine a light on them and, maybe, through my enthusiasm, to get people to reveal more of themselves than they may have intended. The show is laughing at me, adrift in their world, as much as at them. I don't have to play up that stuff. I'm not a matinee idol disguised as a nerd

I've always slightly harboured a dream of making a film, a documentary feature. Somehow I just got into a way of working a routine of making TV docs. It's not as though you do that enough and then graduate - you sort of need to make a conscious decision to work in a different way.

In my normal way of doing things, there's a little bit of 'going native' that takes place, where you're in a world long enough, you can't really help but start to see things in a nuanced, more humanistic way. Just because you're with people and you start to in general slightly like the people you're with.