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" It is in our culture that we don't want to admit that our culture is good. "

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" I decided years ago that I am just unfashionable. "

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow. "

" 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?' "

" 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. "

" Film has changed the way we look at the past. "

" Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly. "

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

" We start out as sand and soot out there in the universe, and who knows, in 40 trillion years' time we might come back. But if we come back without memory, it doesn't really interest me. "

" Autobiographical fiction is very tricky. "

Autobiographical

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

" The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District. "

" What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that. "

" 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. "

" I love writing, and I love making arts programmes. "

" 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. "

" People in jobs that they hate must be worn out. "

" Well, I don't think I'm good-looking... I know people who are good-looking, and I'm not good-looking. "

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

" 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. "

" The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet. "