Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Robin Leach

There are few celebrities that I don't know personally. And compared to the rich, most of the famous live in the poorhouse. It's much better to be rich than famous.

Would I have voted to leave the European Union? Yes, I would. My theory there is that Britain was fed up having won two World Wars against the Germans and had reached the boiling and breaking point of being told where to live and what to do by a bunch of bureaucrats in Belgium. It was out of that frustration that the vote to leave was made.

I do get to meet a lot of people, and I do get to travel quite a bit. You may laugh, but it's a tough job.

Florida is nice, but Texas is my favorite state.

I made my first million by the time I was 31 and promptly lost it when I got divorced.

No other entertainer in the world ever took the risks that Liberace took.

When I interview people, and they give me an immediate answer, they're often not thinking. So I'm silent. I wait. Because they think they have to keep answering. And it's the second train of thought that's the better answer.

I know that people hate me. And I know I'm just a hack journalist and what we do on 'Lifestyles' isn't what you would call television brain surgery.

I'm fast and loud on purpose.

There is this image of a guy in a hot tub, drinking champagne with two buxom blondes. But that is not the real me. I am a father, and I am a grandfather, too.

Celebrities are nowhere as rich as some people think they are.

I've made it a habit not to burn any bridges.

Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes.

I like to say that it never rains on 'Lifestyles.' There is no bad news. It's a very up show.

People know I'll be sensational, not scandalous. There's a fine-line difference. Sensational means titillating the viewer. Scandalous means being condemned by the viewer for making unfair, uncouth revelations.

I've never shied away from hard work.

I wanted no other job than to work in newspapers. I was fascinated by the process of collecting information, talking to people and having the story appear in a paper that would be delivered in your letterbox.

If it weren't for Liberace, there would be no Madonna or Lady Gaga, Elton John, Bette Midler, or Elvis because it was Liberace who helped the King glitz up his act.

Robin Leach is a guy who, when he has the time, goes quietly to his house in Connecticut and sits looking into the fire with a good glass of red wine in his hand. And when I wake up in the morning, I wink at myself because I like me - I know who I am.

I've known Emeril for more than 20 years from when I featured him on 'Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous' from his days at Commander's Palace in New Orleans and from when I helped start the Food Network where he subsequently hosted an amazing 2,000-plus shows.

I've always been a gypsy.

I don't follow English soccer because it's become a game for hooligans.

I don't think that the rich should be attacked. There's nothing wrong in being rich.

The idea for 'Lifestyles' began to take shape in my mind as I became more and more frustrated with the type of celebrity interviews I was doing for television.

Nothing looks as great on videotape as Hollywood after a rain.

I try to tell the story, always. I do not want to be part of it.

I helped launch 'ET'... I like to see things start, grow, and then move on to better things.

I am the most unlikely star in the world.

It is usually people in the money business, finance, and international trade that are really rich.

Back on Nov. 23, 1963, I sailed into Manhattan Harbor onboard the Queen Mary and landed with no job and contacts and just $135 in my pocket. My first lodging was in a rundown hotel for $27 a week with the bathroom down the end of a corridor of beds.

In Italy, they add work and life on to food and wine.

We began our 'Luxe Life' and 'Vegas DeLuxe daily columns' not long after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and we've spent a decade bringing you showbiz stories and star scoops. I hope it continues for a long time to come because I honestly feel that all the late nights and around-the-clock hours to be first and fast keep me young.

I built the ideal house down in the Caribbean. All Englishmen dream of leaving the rain of England and getting a place in the sun - out in the grounds with separate guest houses; that is the ideal scenario.

Tatiana Alvarez, who also became a queen of the wheels of steel in L.A., has now sold her incredible cross-dressing, reverse 'Tootsie' story to Warner Bros. in Hollywood, and hotshot producers Mike Medavoy, Brian Medavoy and Erwin More have reunited to turn it into a movie.

I have no limo. In cities, I usually hail a taxi like everyone else.

There has always been something about the biggest, the wealthiest, the best-known, the most prestigious that has appealed to me. It's always seemed to me that that is what people want to know about.

Nothing gets my journalistic juices flowing more than a seaside chalet, the mention of a private jet, or room service in St. Tropez.

Burnout comes easy in the high-pressure world of television, and when the opportunity arose to move to Las Vegas and bring my friends and star chefs to open their restaurants at the Venetian, I made the move here.

I have met some very strange people and some very strange cats - and I'm not talking about jazz greats. I'm talking about animals that people claim have come from outer space, and boy, they're weird!

I developed the pilot for 'Entertainment Tonight' with Jack Haley, Jr. and Al Masini, who became my business partner in 'Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous,' 'Runaway' and several other shows and specials.

Emeril is a one-in-a-million Renaissance man. In 2002, he established his foundation to support children's educational programs to inspire and mentor young people through culinary arts, school food and nutrition.

It greatly upsets me when I'm called a journalistic toad - I mean, I am a journalist!

The public's appetite for what sensible newspapers call 'personality journalism' and what I call gossip is insatiable. It will never, ever stop growing because everybody dreams.

I'm a big baller.

I am a creator of TV shows. 'Lifestyle' ran for 14 years... that was pleasurable. We also had 'Runaway' for eight years. We did two years of a show called 'The Start of Something Big', and we did a network series called 'Fame, Fortune and Romance.'

There's no point in retiring because there's no fun in retiring.

I like to see things start, grow, and then move on to better things.

Whoever would have guessed that in the land of cheap sausages and mashed potatoes there could be such a change which would actually bring the French from Paris every weekend to invade Britain en masse to eat great food and drink great wine.

People are living such miserable lives economically. They want the escape. They want the fantasy. They'd love the dream of being king for a day or queen for a day.

It hurts to see that everything on television is based on pillaring people. Nobody's sort of given the opportunity to be nice anymore. I think that is somewhat reflective of tragically the society that we live in today where we want to know people off their pedestal or we want to hurt, we want to harm instead of boosting and following by example. It's always about the crud of society, the black sheep of society that producers seem to think the public wants rather than my old theory of the cream rising to the top.

It's tragic what America has become because there is a great segment of society that now resents luxury and success and achievement by others.

Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes. I would say a private paradise in the Caribbean. If you want culture and class, I would say Tuscany. If you want exotic, I would say Bangkok, Thailand.

The great thing is these days I no longer have to work for a living and that all of the things that I'm able to do where money is paid as compensation for whatever it be, I'm able to donate all of that to charity. That's a wonderful position to find yourself in at the latest stages of your life and I'm proud to have walked the path that I have and I'm proud to be able to continue working and to be able to give away what I earn to some very good causes here in the Southwest.

The system is wrong where it rewards the lack of interest in work with money, so you don't have to work.

It's the reason why so many people left Britain like I did in the mid 60s because Britain was exactly the same then as America is today, getting ready to redistribute social wealth and it didn't work. You've seen that in places like Greece, Portugal, Iceland, Ireland where the entire country's business has collapsed, gone bankrupt. That's where America is heading.

Never give up if you really want something, keep plugging away at it and your dreams can come true.

You can't reward people who don't want to work with more money than they would make while they were working.

They say that art comes from the soul. The more drama in an artist's life, the more he can draw on for his art. Van Gogh and Picasso had troubled souls, but poor Steve Kaufman has been shot once, stabbed 3 times - all by women. That is a lot of drama for great art.

Nobody would watch Lifestyles of the Poor and the Unknown.

I think that the spirit of America is still very much one of where people want to work hard and the majority of people want to work hard. They want to be entrepreneurs. But when you have that all taken away with government regulation or with government overbearance of taxation, you start to wonder whether if it's even worthwhile because who are you really working for? Are you working for yourself, are you working for the government? In the end, this wealth distribution scheme that's at the heart of the current political administration is an inherently wrong one.