Words matter. These are the best Melvyn Bragg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Sometimes, you’re just moved by people’s journeys.
A lot of the novels I admire are ‘admirably provincial.’
I don’t feel inferior in the slightest to anybody – or superior to anybody, let’s get that clear. But I do feel different.
I think television does tease out a certain vanity in everybody when you look at yourself and you go, ‘Oh Christ.’ Maybe that’s why my intros get shorter and shorter.
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?’
Film has changed the way we look at the past.
I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that’s what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that’s what I am.
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.
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.
Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him.
If you look at the creative economy in this country, it’s per capita way bigger than any other in the world.
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.
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.
Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.
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.
Well, I don’t think I’m good-looking… I know people who are good-looking, and I’m not good-looking.
Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.
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.
There’s a lot of hours in the week if you use them properly.
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.
It is in our culture that we don’t want to admit that our culture is good.
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 believe in a personal God, no. And I don’t believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.
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.
I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.
In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.
Class doesn’t create culture anymore.
It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally.
I decided years ago that I am just unfashionable.
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?
I’ve been writing since I was 19.
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 don’t get nervous when I’m interviewing someone on film – it can be cut, and we can do it again. It is quite nerve-racking doing things live.
The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.
I’m a class mongrel.
One of the great things about making ‘Reel History’ was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.
I’m addicted to ‘Game Of Thrones.’
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.
I enjoy what was called ‘swotting’ in my day.
The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.
A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you – they see where you’re going.
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.
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.
Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.
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 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.
I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.
I’m going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.
To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn’t exactly selling general morality or atheism short.
Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We’ll have the law on you!
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.
People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.
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!
It is very difficult for middle-aged, institutionalised males who have done so well out of subsidy – and, fair play, given much back – to realise that there is a time to be a well-heeled revolutionary.
Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I’ve got a slim volume of work.
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 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.
Work is a great blotter up. It stops you thinking, which is useful. No, it stops you feeling.
Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.
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.
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.
Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.
In the 40 or so years I’ve known David Puttnam, not only has he pursued an outstanding career in films and now politics, but he has been the keeper of the flame of the British film industry.
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.
