If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.

If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.

I'm tired of speaking for hours, so from now on, I will reduce the duration of my 'Returning Happiness to People' speech ever [sic] Friday and will have my ministers who oversee each topic to speak in the programme.

Give brief orders; speeches that are too long are likely to be forgotten.

Prepare your mind and heart before you prepare your speech. What we say may be less important than how we say it.

When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.

The Doctor does have some long speeches and he talks very quickly. Learning all his babble can take a while, but it's very well written babble so I don't mind and you do get quicker. When I filmed Recovery during the break in Doctor Who I would sit down at the weekend and learn the script in an hour and I was like 'Hang on??' You do get used to it though.

O people, the first day is difficult but if I live I shall deliver a proper speech.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

I do write my own speeches.

The experience of this campaign vindicated his belief that politics was essentially personal relations. In a twenty-minute appearance, he limited his speeches to five minutes so that he could spend the remaining fifteen minutes “touching” his audience. “A five-minute speech,” he later said, “with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen-minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.

If you want to say something clever, you have only to talk long enough.

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

Take that long as time to prepare