QUOTES by Melvyn Bragg
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
I don't believe in a personal God, no. And I don't believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
I've been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day, I can't believe my luck.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
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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!
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
Well, I don't think I'm good-looking... I know people who are good-looking, and I'm not good-looking.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
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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.
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Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him.
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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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote 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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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!
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
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I don't feel inferior in the slightest to anybody - or superior to anybody, let's get that clear. But I do feel different.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg
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.
Quote by -Melvyn Bragg