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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" I enjoy what was called 'swotting' in my day. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn't changed much since I was 22. "

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

" 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 don't want closure, I don't know what that means or why you would want it. "

" I'm a class mongrel. "

" 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. "

" There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I don't feel inferior in the slightest to anybody - or superior to anybody, let's get that clear. But I do feel different. "

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

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

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