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

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" 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. "

" I'll never forget my interview with Barry Humphries - one of the oddest I've ever done. He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna. So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly. "

" I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it. "

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

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

" We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn't have to have instruments except your voice. "

" Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia - you know, back in the '40s and '50s. "

" I'm a class mongrel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him. "

" 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! "

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

" I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I'm not going to give it up now. "

" I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together. "

" It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally. "

Popular Culture

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

" 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. "

" Sometimes, you're just moved by people's journeys. "

" Craig has explored the darker recesses of 007's psyche. He has shown us the lonely man. And he has shown him falling truly in love. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way. "

" 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 don't feel like I'm slowing down. "