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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? "

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

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

" In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology. "

" The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it. "

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

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

" 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. "

" There's a lot of hours in the week if you use them properly. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 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. "