I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I'm not going to give it up now.
— Melvyn Bragg
I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.
I was the only BBC graduate trainee in 1961 interested in arts broadcasting. I knew I wanted to write, and I had to make a living.
I think television does tease out a certain vanity in everybody when you look at yourself and you go, 'Oh Christ.' Maybe that's why my intros get shorter and shorter.
I'm a Labour party supporter, but I'm also a democrat.
One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.
More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.
I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.
I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.
It is very difficult for middle-aged, institutionalised males who have done so well out of subsidy - and, fair play, given much back - to realise that there is a time to be a well-heeled revolutionary.
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.
Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'
In the 40 or so years I've known David Puttnam, not only has he pursued an outstanding career in films and now politics, but he has been the keeper of the flame of the British film industry.
In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music.
The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.
I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.
If you look at the creative economy in this country, it's per capita way bigger than any other in the world.
Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.
I am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me.
I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.
The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.
Film has changed the way we look at the past.
Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.
A lot of the novels I admire are 'admirably provincial.'
Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers.
I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.
Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.
The success of the arts has come through a mix of public subsidy, substantial private support, and good box-office receipts, but central to Labour's post-1997 programme has been a determination to increase access as much as excellence.
Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.
We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.
As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.
You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!
I was born in a radio world, and I got so much from it.
It's amazing that Sky is the only place that has two dedicated arts channels. The BBC is doing very well... but why don't they do more?
Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it.
There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way.
Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.
I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.'
The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it.
A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.
Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.
In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.
Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.
In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it.
Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.
In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.
The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.
I just got fed up with the Protestantism that I'd been brought up with being rubbed out, disregarded. There's an awful lot of frailty and doubt about it, which I understand and share, but there are certain things you just have to acknowledge.
