I did everything the wrong way round. I started in an odd place, with the wrong skill set and arguably worked backwards. I began my television career in Hong Kong, making longer format films from around Asia, then I went to the other extreme - presenting local London news.

Emily Maitlis

I have to listen to the midnight news and I have to see if any of my interview lines have been picked up.

Emily Maitlis

Somehow we have to be able to indicate to our audience that we know how frustrating it is when the answers they are hearing are necessarily the answers that the person speaking them believes.

Emily Maitlis

I am addicted to the highlighter pen, my papers generally a garish mix of type, Biro, unreadable scribble and lashings of luminosity, as if they belong to the unhinged.

Emily Maitlis

The hour or so I spent with the ninety-year-old David Attenborough was one of the most beatific of my life. An oddly religious term, I know, for a man who doesn't have much truck with religion, but it was the serenity of that time that will stay with me most.

Emily Maitlis

I was a terrible reporter. The only advantage was I made all my mistakes in a place and at a time where I didn't know anyone, but I literally made every mistake in the book.

Emily Maitlis

I hear some horror stories from other channels, and I think what a blessing to work with a team of people that you're genuinely happy to hang with. I don't feel I need to dominate 'Newsnight.'

Emily Maitlis

I think you go into a debate trying to be fair minded and trying to be balanced but occasionally there will be a sense where it feels like the moral imperative is pulling you one direction or another.

Emily Maitlis

I think what I notice now is that a lot of the things that are said to us on camera on air are not particularly believed and quite often not true and its an extraordinary position to be in when you've had WhatsApp messages, text messages off record.

Emily Maitlis

My second TV assignment ever was to go to Cambodia to look at the state of the country in the dying days of the Khmer Rouge. I was naive, awkward, and not very good at writing to pictures.

Emily Maitlis

I have heard somewhere an argument that if the Industrial Revolution - economic development - had started in Africa rather than Europe, then sun and wave technology would now be at the forefront, not the old fossil fuels.

Emily Maitlis

I've ended up in prison a number of times, once in Cambodia, once in Cuba - for hours rather than days.

Emily Maitlis

I remember the Silver Jubilee clearly because we had a fancy dress street party in Sheffield. I dressed up as a Japanese girl with a too-big red kimono - cultural appropriation hadn't been invented in 1977. I was six.

Emily Maitlis

I have worked out I can quite happily jog the distance to work as long as I hail a cab first and leave my high heels on the back seat.

Emily Maitlis

It's arguing, in a very good and positive way. It's sort of sitting down and pulling an argument apart. I think that's a very oddly Jewish thing. And it's the chaos of family and a slight sort of cosy messiness of it all.

Emily Maitlis

We're not robots. There isn't a perfect formula for an interview and there are days when you bring too much of you and there are days, quite honestly, when you don't bring enough of you.

Emily Maitlis

There's no point meeting somebody with a meat cleaver the moment they open their mouth - because they're going to clam up, you're going to have lost your impact and the audience is going to hate you for not allowing anyone to say anything.

Emily Maitlis

Some interviews wind you up. Some test your mettle. Some reduce you to a gibbering wreck.

Emily Maitlis

I certainly don't want to be part of a media that forces confessions from people who are not going to behave any differently the next time round.

Emily Maitlis

As in life, so with television: timing is everything.

Emily Maitlis

I am always impressed by interviewers who can do the whole thing without notes. I can't. I need reminders on my knee. Dates, first names, quotes in bold text.

Emily Maitlis