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.

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 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.

As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.

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

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!

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.

Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.

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

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.

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.

I decided years ago that I am just unfashionable.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I've been writing since I was 19.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.

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.