Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Melvyn Bragg

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.

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.

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 enjoy what was called 'swotting' in my day.

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

More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.

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

I decided years ago that I am just unfashionable.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We'll have the law on you!

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

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

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.

In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.

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

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.

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

I don't believe in a personal God, no. And I don't believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama?

I was born in a radio world, and I got so much from it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

I'm a class mongrel.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm addicted to 'Game Of Thrones.'

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.

My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn't if you keep training it.

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've been writing since I was 19.

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

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.

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

I've been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day, I can't believe my luck.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

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

People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.