I feel opera is an expression of artistic excellence. To do it is expensive, as there's a requirement for an orchestra, good voices, excellent sets, and the fact that productions generally have only short runs. But I believe it's something we ought to achieve as a nation.
— Michael Portillo
I have never served on a jury because MPs were exempted - or banned, I think.
My grandfather was a great advocate of Scottish art at a time when Scottish artists struggled to be taken seriously. They were not highly regarded, but he fought for them, befriended them, and championed them.
My father was possessed of an extraordinary romantic idealism, an unwavering belief in certain principles. He was always talking about the past. Always. Of course, it has a powerful effect on me.
The stakes are high in politics.
We in Britain do not have the same capabilities as the United States, but we are members of the United Nations Security Council. And we take our obligations and duties deriving from that very seriously.
I don't think I've got a thick skin, but I've not felt particularly humiliated by the things which people think I would have felt humiliated by, such as losing my seat in 1997 and not being elected leader in 2001. In the second case, I felt relieved.
A parliamentary democracy that has developed its delicate balances over hundreds of years will not give up its sovereign rights.
Travelling the railways of Europe with a century-old guidebook can be disconcerting: fares, food, and drink seem shockingly expensive compared with what they were; trains and paddle-steamers run to unexpected timetables (assuming they're still running at all); and not only states but whole empires have been wiped from the map.
My favourite British line is the West Highland line. It was built across moorland where no one had succeeded in building a road. So everything in that area is there because of the railway line.
They say travel enables you to encounter your opposite. If this is true, I think I may have met mine in a shepherd's hut in Transylvania.
Few people have heard of John Hawkshaw, the engineer responsible for Brighton's sewers, but he also built the Severn Tunnel and parts of the London Underground system. Such figures, largely forgotten now, conceived an infrastructure that was perfect in its fine detail and intended to last for a century or more - as it has.
The two biggest legacies of the Raj are the unification of India and the English language. Moreover, without the railways, India would not have been connected and could not have become one country.
As a presenter, you have to speak with artificial energy and enthusiasm.
I'm vain.
Again and again, people get more conservative as they get older.
In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.
Wagner had a terrific understanding of politics. In 1829, he was a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to bring down the establishment. He hated religion and churches, which he said enslaved people. But he later developed different views that put art at the centre of the life of the state.
People have said to me, 'Oh, you are much nicer making documentaries than you were in politics.' So I should be. If you are making a documentary, you are having fun. You are not under any pressure, normally.
Whenever I'm in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood - as do other family members.
I was brought up in a house where I was so aware of a life that had been broken by politics and conflict.
Our situations... are very different. The nature of our politics is different. I don't deny, though, that political cycles, which are observable in the United States, are sometimes observable here.
To be in the media is to be in the wings. Being in politics is being on the stage.
People don't understand it, but the most intense occasions in the House of Commons were the ones I enjoyed most. When events could go either way and you could find yourself out of a job by the end of the day, those were the times when you were most on a high.
I don't know why, but I think the eating of food is hugely enhanced when you do it on a train. Even a simple steak and chips, when the world is rushing past outside, can take you to heaven.
I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.
The advantage of trains over planes is that there is much less hassle. You can get up from your seat and stroll about; you're more likely to meet people, and, particularly if you're making a long journey, you can actually see the terrain.
I hope I succeed in demonstrating that you may equally find compelling and significant narratives - stories that alter or add to our understanding of history - in unprepossessing places: a Victorian sewer system; a Cold War bunker; derelict hospitals.
From Brighton to Bradford, from Suffolk to Somerset, I have explored some remarkable buildings and structures that, in different ways, have helped to shed light on the way modern Britain has developed.
There's much about the British Raj which I think is disreputable. It was rapacious; it was a sort of kleptocracy, and it was also racist. Indians were not treated as equals.
I don't mind being a bit of a showman.
The truth is a good thing.
I'm nothing to do with the Conservative Party; I'm not a member of the Conservative Party. I stopped being a member shortly after I stopped being a member of Parliament and I took up a career as a broadcaster.
Politics hasn't changed, but I've changed.
For someone like me, making a documentary - I don't kid myself. There's no influence at all. What I do is entertainment. I would even say much the same about the column I write in 'The Sunday Times.'
When you are being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, you are the prisoner in the dock: assumed guilty unless proved innocent, under intense pressure, on the defensive. There are very few people who can look relaxed in that position.
British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.
I have that normal male thing of valuing myself according to the job I do.
We must have a welfare system that we can afford, which will mean giving greater attention to directing the welfare program toward its primary purposes and its intended beneficiaries.
Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid.
There's only one person who knows me - and that's me.
'Bradshaw's' is a lovely device for the time-travelling television presenter. I just hope that people buying it aren't doing so with the intention of plotting a tour of 21st-century Europe. They'll find quite a lot has changed since 1913.
People are obviously very interested in travel, including travel in Britain.
Music turns the world upside down.
For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.
People wear extraordinarily bright colours in India.
I enjoyed dressing in Indian clothes. I loved those long, single-piece garments that come down to the knees and the white pyjamas you wear underneath.
I worry how I look.
I'm a man with a great political future behind me.
One of the reasons that Thatcher promoted home ownership is that it promoted responsible citizens with a stake in society. But another reason was that those people would tend to be Conservative.
