There are fear mongers who talk about Islam as somehow it is an incubator of hate... remember Christians, like the Westboro Baptist Church, are just as capable of promoting intolerance.

You can talk to someone relatively famous, and they say, 'What do you do? What do you do for a job?' and I say, 'I make documentaries for the BBC,' and you see their eyes just glaze over.

L.A. is the opposite of Britain in a lot of respects, and that's what draws so many British people here.

You can say, 'I am a poet, rock-climbing shaman, and my name is Hiawatha Moonbeam,' and people in America will say, 'Hey, that's great. All power to you, man'.

I'm not that comfortable doing polemic or being strident.

I think what I'm good at is getting to know people and trying to build a relationship over a few weeks and trying to get to the truth.

I don't like that feeling of holding back difficult questions. I feel like the more I can be transparent in the way I approach a story, the more it makes a satisfying programme.

I never misrepresent my position - you've got to be strong enough to make the argument and marshal the case.

Sometimes I feel a bit socially disconnected in terms of being a little bit gullible about how people interrelate emotionally.

Arguably, there's an emotional side of life that I'm not always completely plugged into.

Clearly I'm able to read emotions. But I do feel... What is it? Awkwardness. I'm not a slick dude. That's what it comes down to. The nakedness, the guilelessness... that's quite real.

Most people feel that they are the heroes of their own lives and that they're good people. So if they're in a crisis, they feel an understandable urge to set out their own version of events.

I feel like, if there's an elephant in the room, I'd really like to start off by introducing the elephant in the room. And sometimes it's funny.

When interviews are too cosy, I don't enjoy them.

I just follow the subjects I'm interested in.

I like eating food after it's gone off.

I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.

As a BBC broadcaster, I really do hope that the new incarnation of 'Top Gear' with Chris Evans does well.

All religions are, in some basic sense, irrational.

I think I have a slight fear of intimacy.

I was always attracted and repelled by the idea of being a writer.

Sometimes people think I'm sort of a Machiavelli who is thinking, 'How can I disarm people? I know: I'll create a persona; I'll get some spectacles, and when I meet you, I'll say, 'How are you doing?' And I will be very unassuming and polite and never get angry.'

I am genuinely slightly vague and chaotic in my habits. For good or ill, you know.

My guilty fear is that what I'm doing, probably anyone could do. And that I just got a lot of lucky breaks.

In the past, I've tried to show the human side of people involved in stigmatised or misunderstood lifestyles. I've tried to resist easy judgments and not pander to prejudices.

I try not to be too judgmental.

If I actually invited someone to make a documentary about me, and I said, 'Anything goes', and then I refused to answer any questions, that would be inconsistent.

I don't think I'm afraid of anything.

I think there's a feeling of - a grassroots feeling of being betrayed by the elites in some way: that the system is working for itself and not for the people at the bottom.

The documentary genre, shows like 'Making a Murderer' and 'The Jinx' on HBO, there's been a whole raft of long-form docs.

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.

Funnily enough, the most danger I felt was when I did a story about exotic animals kept as pets in America.

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

It's in the DNA of all the shows that I have done that are about people that are dealing with very stressful situations that are giving them a lot of angst.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Big game hunters and the hunting industry in South Africa know a lot of people regard what they do as terrible, and the media have tended not to do them any favours. So it was an uphill struggle to win trust from the people and to get into the world.

There's always a negotiation that goes on to persuade people we are coming to the subject with an open mind but without surrendering too many pawns. We don't want to misrepresent the fact that we will draw our own conclusions.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

We have a double agenda of trying to deliver something exciting that people will talk about and will brighten their day and will amaze people and make us proud to have created an object of beauty. And on the other hand being true to the story.