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" As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics. "

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" There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama? "

" To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn't exactly selling general morality or atheism short. "

" Darwin talks about evolution, but he doesn't say how it started. Maybe the sense of mystery will dissolve in the face of science, but I am not so sure. We are all described by the human genome, but it's getting people nowhere. "

" Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists. "

" Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator. "

" I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.' "

" I've been writing since I was 19. "

" I'm a Labour party supporter, but I'm also a democrat. "

" Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work. "

" More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal. "

" We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords. "

" I was born in a radio world, and I got so much from 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. "

" A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you - they see where you're going. "

" Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don't look around enough. They don't know enough. "

" Work is a great blotter up. It stops you thinking, which is useful. No, it stops you feeling. "

" The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen. "

" That's why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you've been somewhere and come back that hasn't hurt you, and you've been somebody else. "

" Class doesn't create culture anymore. "

" I wanted 'The South Bank Show' to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy. "

" The BBC does a sterling job, but I'd like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying. "

" I don't go around thinking I'm attractive or not attractive. It has never occurred to me. People don't think like that where I come from... No one has ever said, 'Oh, he's a good-looking bloke.' They just didn't use those words about men. "

" 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. "

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" In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture. "

" 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? "

" The driving force behind 'In Our Time' is that I want an education. I want to know more about science, say, and if I want to know, then other people probably do, too. "

" 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. "

" A lot of the novels I admire are 'admirably provincial.' "

" If I meet pals, we do hug each other, and it's very nice, you know... it's something that's come on me late and became second nature, and it's first nature now! "

" I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle. "